Pico Iyer’s new book, Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign (Knopf) comes out this week.
Pico Iyer – one of our most compelling and profoundly provocative travel writers – invites us to accompany him on an array of exotic explorations, from L.A. and Yemen to Haiti and Ethiopia, from a Bolivian prison to a hidden monastery in Tibet. He goes to Cambodia, where the main tourist attraction is a collection of skulls from the Khmer Rouge killing fields, and travels through southern Arabia in the weeks before September 11, 2001. He practices meditation with Leonard Cohen and discusses geopolitics with the Dalai Lama, travels to Easter Island and through the imaginative terrains of W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro, weaving physical and psychological challenges together into a seamless narrative.
Throughout his travels, the familiar thrill of adventure is haunted by the unsettling questions that arise for Iyer everywhere he goes: How do we reconcile suffering with the sunlight often found around it? How does the foreign instruct the traveler, precisely by discomfiting him? And how does travel take us more deeply into reality, both within us and without? Intensely affecting, Iyer’s explorations are a road map of thinking in new ways about our changing world.
Events that I’ve found so far:
Booksmith, San Francisco, CA: April 20, 7 pm
Capitola Book Cafe, Capitola, CA: Wednesday, April 21st 7:30 p.m.
Easy Going, Berkeley, CA: April 23, 7:30 PM
Elliott Bay, Seattle, WA: Tuesday, April 27 at 7:30 p.m.
Village Books, Bellingham, WA: April 28, 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles, CA: Friday, April 30, 2004 7:30 PM
Interviews with Pico Iyer:
Author Q & A regarding Abandon
Rolf Potts with Pico Iyer
insight & Outlook with Pico Iyer
Don George and with Pico Iyer on Lonely Planet
Very good news! I love this guy. I even got to meet him once at a talk he gave on Abandon (which I reviewed for the local weekly paper–name drop, name drop), and he was -really- nice. Great writer too. Thanks for the news, Jen! (And everything else…:-)
Jen
you should read some of his stuff – will make you see how shite Peter Moore is….
His lady and the monk is stunning…for a time I thought he was one of the best writers around (then I read Off the Map and I thought…well, he is good…)
His stuff on tibet is also very good…
I’ve got some mixed feelings about pico iyer. on the one hand, he does a lot to advance travel writing to an art form. he is one of the most consistently engaging and intellectually stimulating nonfiction writers out there. so god bless him for that.
BUUUUT, he has a way with playing around with the facts that irritates me sometimes. let’s call it hyperbole. for instance, in the press release, cambodia is described as being a country in which skulls from its genocide are the biggest tourist attraction. um, anyone heard of angkor wat? ok, so that may have been the work of an overexcited marketing assistant. but having noticed such sloppiness with the truth in his other work, i bet it’s from this book. i just feel that sometimes he ignores certain salient facts in order to sensationalize the places he visits and amp up the “postmodern” qualities.
but of course, i’m still going to read the book!
Sarah, nice input. I think calling him on that, or asking him about it, would be a great discussion point at one of the author events.
but still a new book is always worth celebrating isnt it….