New Releases by Pico Iyer

From one of the most captivating and perceptive writers of our time and the bestselling author of Aflame—a life-affirming memoir on the challenges of facing death For forty years, Pico Iyer has been known as a keen observer of crisscrossing cultures and a soulful exponent of the art of stillness. As he sat beside his mother during her final seasons, he faced a newly intimate and bracing consideration of aging and parent-child relationships. To his surprise, he found that the best guide to understanding this archetypal passage was the poet that he and his mother both loved, William Shakespeare. Inspired by canonical Shakespeare texts, Iyer investigates how to care for an elderly parent while staring down anxieties about his own mortality, what to do when the future flattens into a perpetual present, and how we might find joy in this impermanent world. The Messenger in White is a tender look at the bracing changes, challenges, and delights that emerge as we age. With magnetic storytelling, gorgeous prose, and abundant good humor, Iyer charts a course through the storms of later life into the surprises and possibilities that lie beyond.

A book about Santa Barbara, California

From the bestselling author of The Art of Stillness, a revelatory exploration of the abiding clarity and calm to be found in quiet retreat Pico Iyer has made more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s not a Christian—or a member of any religious group—but his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence. That silence reminds him of what is essential and awakens a joy that nothing can efface. It’s not just freedom from distraction and noise and rush: it’s a reminder of some deeper truths he misplaced along the way. In Aflame, Iyer connects with inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant change: a house burns down, a parent dies, a daughter is diagnosed with cancer. He shares the revelations he experiences, alongside wisdom from other nonmonastics who have learned from adversity and inwardness. And most profoundly, he shows how solitude can be a training in community and companionship. In so doing, he offers a unique outsider’s view of monastic life—and of a group of selfless souls who have dedicated their days to ensuring there’s a space for quiet and recollection that’s open to us all. Radiant, intimate, and gripping, Aflame offers ageless counsel about the power of silence and what it can teach us about how to live, how to love, and, ultimately, how to die.

No hotel is as inseparably linked to its city than Raffles Hotel, writes Pico Iyer, arguably the world’s greatest travel writer alive. Drawing upon numerous stays in Raffles over 35 years and the fast-ascending city all around it, Iyer—a lifelong global soul—reflects on the “Grand Old Lady’s” literary legacy and its mark on writers everywhere. In the process, he finds new ways of considering not just yesterday, but tomorrow. How have Singapore and its white-stucco monument evolved to meet the needs of a shifting world? In this compact volume, Iyer pulls back the curtains on a personal, thoughtful and surprising look at places we too often take for granted.

“Arguably the greatest living travel writer” (Outside magazine), Pico Iyer has called Japan home for more than three decades. But, as he is the first to admit, the country remains an enigma even to its long-term residents. In A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, Iyer draws on his years of experience—his travels, conversations, readings, and reflections—to craft a playful and profound book of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture. He recounts his adventures and observations as he travels from a meditation hall to a love hotel, from West Point to Kyoto Station, and from dinner with Meryl Streep to an ill-fated call to the Apple service center in a series of provocations guaranteed to pique the interest and curiosity of those who don’t know Japan—and to remind those who do of its myriad fascinations.

In this “exquisite personal blend of philosophy and engagement, inner quiet and worldly life" (Los Angeles Times), an acclaimed author returns to his longtime home in Japan after his father-in-law’s sudden death and picks up the steadying patterns of his everyday rites, reminding us to take nothing for granted. In a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honoring the dead, Pico Iyer comes to reflect on changelessness in ways that anyone can relate to: parents age, children scatter, and Iyer and his wife turn to whatever can sustain them as everything falls away. As the maple leaves begin to turn and the heat begins to soften, Iyer shows us a Japan we have seldom seen before, where the transparent and the mysterious are held in a delicate balance.

At dawn I wake up to bells . . . red-tailed hawks above the golden pampas grass and the great, still blue plate of the Pacific far below . . . Many places offer you beauty, grandeur, spaciousness; none but Big Sur, in my experience, tells you so powerfully that all those blessings lie within. —Pico Iyer on Big Sur, California Some places move us at a profound level—with a kind of inner beauty that puts us in direct touch with the spirit. It might be a temple, a church, a monument, a wayside shrine, or a landscape feature that is saturated in the ambience of ancient sacred traditions. Such places are worth taking the trouble to visit. They add meaning to our lives, awakening a sense of beauty, tranquility or awe. From the prehistoric megaliths of Carnac in Brittany to the Buddhist temple complex of Borobodur in Java, from the giant medicine wheel at Bighorn, Wyoming in the USA to the Confucian Temple of Heaven in Beijing, this book will guide you on a journey to 100 of the world’s most spiritually uplifting sites. Accompanying the superb photographs are evocative descriptions of each place, many from esteemed writers who share their personal responses in their own inimitable style. Read Joseph Williams III on Pipestone in Minnesota, Jan Morris on Croagh Patrick in County Mayo, Michael Ondaatje on the Arankale Forest Monastery in Sri Lanka, and more. And if you wish to seek out these places for yourself, there is a helpful gazetteer at the back of the book giving key facts for visitors. By immersing ourselves in those special places where landscape, art, and spirit meet in a radiant intersection, we enlarge our perspective on life. This book gives us the inspiration and knowledge to do so.

Lonely Planet: The world''s leading travel guide publisher Humorous tales of travel and misadventure. Lonely Planet knows that some of life''s funniest experiences happen on the road. Whether they take the form of unexpected detours, unintended adventures, unidentifiable dinners or unforgettable encounters, they can give birth to our most found travel lessons, and our most memorable - and hilarious - travel stories. These 31 globegirdling tales that run the gamut from close-encounter safaris to loss-of-face follies, hair-raising rides to culture-leaping brides, eccentric expats to mind-boggling repasts, wrong roads taken to agreements mistaken. The collection brings together some of the world''s most renowned travellers and storytellers with previously unpublished writers. Includes stories by Wickam Boyle, Tim Cahill, Joshua Clark, Sean Condon, Chistopher R.Cox, David Downie, Holly Erikson, Bill Fink, Don George, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Jeff Grenwald, Pico Iyer, Amanda Jones, Kathie Kertesz, Doug Lansky, Alexander Ludwick, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Jan Morris, Brooke Neill, Rolf Potts, Laura Resau, Michelle Richmond, Alana Semuels, Deborah Steg, Judy Tierney, Edwin Tucker, Jeff Vize, Danny Wallace, Kelly Watton, Simon Wichester, Michelle Witton About Lonely Planet: Started in 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world''s leading travel guide publisher with guidebooks to every destination on the planet, as well as an award-winning website, a suite of mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet''s mission is to enable curious travellers to experience the world and to truly get to the heart of the places where they travel. TripAdvisor Travellers'' Choice Awards 2012 and 2013 winner in Favorite Travel Guide category ''Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.'' - New York Times ''Lonely Planet. It''s on everyone''s bookshelves; it''s in every traveller''s hands. It''s on mobile phones. It''s on the Internet. It''s everywhere, and it''s telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.'' - Fairfax Media (Australia) *#1 in the world market share - source: Nielsen Bookscan. Australia, UK and USA. March 2012-January 2013 Important Notice: The digital edition of this book may not contain all of the images found in the physical edition.

A follow up to Pico Iyer’s essay “The Joy of Quiet,” The Art of Stillness considers the unexpected adventure of staying put and reveals a counterintuitive truth: The more ways we have to connect, the more we seem desperate to unplug. Why might a lifelong traveler like Pico Iyer, who has journeyed from Easter Island to Ethiopia, Cuba to Kathmandu, think that sitting quietly in a room might be the ultimate adventure? Because in our madly accelerating world, our lives are crowded, chaotic and noisy. There’s never been a greater need to slow down, tune out and give ourselves permission to be still. In The Art of Stillness—a TED Books release—Iyer investigate the lives of people who have made a life seeking stillness: from Matthieu Ricard, a Frenchman with a PhD in molecular biology who left a promising scientific career to become a Tibetan monk, to revered singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who traded the pleasures of the senses for several years of living the near-silent life of meditation as a Zen monk. Iyer also draws on his own experiences as a travel writer to explore why advances in technology are making us more likely to retreat. He reflects that this is perhaps the reason why many people—even those with no religious commitment—seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or seeking silent retreats. These aren''t New Age fads so much as ways to rediscover the wisdom of an earlier age. Growing trends like observing an “Internet Sabbath”—turning off online connections from Friday night to Monday morning—highlight how increasingly desperate many of us are to unplug and bring stillness into our lives. The Art of Stillness paints a picture of why so many—from Marcel Proust to Mahatma Gandhi to Emily Dickinson—have found richness in stillness. Ultimately, Iyer shows that, in this age of constant movement and connectedness, perhaps staying in one place is a more exciting prospect, and a greater necessity than ever before. In 2013, Pico Iyer gave a blockbuster TED Talk. This lyrical and inspiring book expands on a new idea, offering a way forward for all those feeling affected by the frenetic pace of our modern world.

The artist combines wide-angle photographs of landscapes from throughout the world that exhibit fundamental, formal similarities and rhythms by connecting them with a common horizon line.

We all carry other people inside our heads - actors, leaders, writers, people from history or fiction, met or unmet, who sometimes seem closer to us than the people we know.Pico Iyer investigates the mysterious closeness he has always felt with Graham Greene and follows him from his first novel, The Man Within, to such later classics as The Quiet American. The further he delves, the more he begins to wonder whether the man within his head is not Greene but his own father, or perhaps some more shadowy aspect of himself. Drawing upon experiences across the globe - from Bolivia to Berkhamsted to Bhutan - one of our most resourceful cultural explorers gives us his most personal and revelatory book.

The author of Video Night in Kathmandu ups the ante on himself in this sublimely evocative and acerbically funny tour through the world''s loneliest and most eccentric places. From Iceland to Bhutan to Argentina, Iyer remains both uncannily observant and hilarious.

Having captivated readers with such gems of travel writing as Video Night in Kathmandu, Pico Iyer now presents a novel whose central character is another place: the melancholy, ebullient, and dazzlingly inconsistent island that is Castro''s Cuba. "On almost every page you can smell the dust, the cheap perfume and the rum of Havana today, or better still, tonight."--Los Angeles Times.

In Tropical Classical the author of Video Nights in Katmandu and The Lady and the Monk visits a holy city in Ethiopia, where hooded worshippers practice a Christianity that has remained unchanged since the Middle Ages. He follows the bewilderingly complex route of Bombay''s dabbawallahs, who each day ferry 100,000 different lunches to 100,000 different workers. Iyer chats with the Dalai Lama and assesses the books of Salman Rushdie and Cormac McCarthy. And he brings his perceptive eye and unflappable wit to bear on the postmodern vogues for literary puffery, sexual gamesmanship, and frequent-flier miles. Glittering with aphorisms, overflowing with insight, and often hilarious, Tropical Classical represents some of Iyer''s finest work.

Pico Iyer has for many years described with keen perception and exacting wit the shifting textures of faraway lands anchored on a spinning globe that mixes and matches East and West. Now he casts a philosophical eye upon this curious state of floatingness. In the transnational village that our world has become, travel and technology fuel each other and us. As Iyer points out, "everywhere is so made up of everywhere else," and our very souls have been put into circulation. Yet even global beings need a home. Using his own multicultural upbringing (Indian, American, British) as a point of departure, Iyer sets out on a quest, both physical and psychological, to find what remains constant in a world gone mobile. He begins in Los Angeles International Airport, where town life — shops, services, sociability — is available without a town, and in Hong Kong, where people actually live in self-contained hotels. He moves on to Toronto, which has been given new life and a new literature by its immigrant population, and to Atlanta, where the Olympic Village inadvertently commemorates the corporate universalism that is the Olympics'' secret face. And, finally, he returns to England, where the effects of empire-as-global-village are still being sorted out, and to Japan, where in the midst of alien surfaces, Iyer unexpectedly finds a home. "As a guide to far-flung places, Pico Iyer can hardly be surpassed," The New Yorker has written. In The Global Soul, he extends the meaning of far-flung to places within and all around us.

When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old cities in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture today -- not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the silence of temples, of the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind the rising sun of geopolitical power. All this he did. And then he met Sachiko. Vivacious, attractive, thoroughly educated, speaking English enthusiastically if eccentrically, the wife of a Japanese "salaryman" who seldom left the office before 10 P.M., Sachiko was as conversant with tea ceremony and classical Japanese literature as with rock music, Goethe, and Vivaldi. With the lightness of touch that made Video Night in Kathmandu so captivating, Pico Iyer fashions from their relationship a marvelously ironic yet heartfelt book that is at once a portrait of cross-cultural infatuation -- and misunderstanding -- and a delightfully fresh way of seeing both the old Japan and the very new.

Mohawk hair-cuts in Bali, yuppies in Hong Kong and Rambo rip-offs in the movie houses of Bombay are just a few of the jarring images that Iyer brings back from the Far East.

A collection of 26 inspiring tales.

From the national bestselling author of The Half-Known Life comes an intoxicating novel that''s at once a stylish intellectual mystery and a pulse-quickening love story—the love in question being at once sacred and profane. John Macmillan, a classically reticent Englishman who has moved to California to study the poems of the Sufi mystic Rumi, unexpectedly becomes involved in two equally absorbing quests. The first is for a mysterious Rumi manuscript that may have been smuggled out of Iran; the second for the elusive Camilla Jensen, who continually offers herself to him only to repeatedly slip from his grasp. Are these quests somehow related? And can Macmillan give himself over to them without losing his career and identity? Moving deftly from California academia to the mosques of Iran, filled with insights into the minds of Islam and the modern West, Abandon is a magic carpet-ride of a book.

Pico Iyer&Mdash;One Of The Most Compelling And Profoundly Provocative Travel Writers&Mdash;Invites Us To Accompany Him On An Array Of Exotic Explorations, From L.A. To 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&Rsquo;S Explorations Are A Road Map Of Thinking In New Ways About Our Changing World. &Nbsp;

A Beautifully Written Book About Someone Looking For Ancient Dreams In A Strange Modern Place'' Los Angeles Times Book Review When Pico Iyer Decided To Go To Kyoto And Live In A Monastery, He Did So To Learn About Zen Buddhism From The Inside, To Get To Know Kyoto, One Of The Loveliest Old Cities In The World, And To Find Out Something About Japanese Culture Not The World Of Businessmen And Production Lines, But The Traditional World Of Changing Seasons And The Silence Of Temples, Of The Images Woven Through Literature, Of The Lunar Japan That Still Lives On Behind The Rising Sun Of Geopolitical Power. All This He Did. And Then He Met Sachiko. Vivacious, Attractive, Thoroughly Educated, Speaking English Enthusiastically If Eccentrically, The Wife Of A Japanese `Salaryman'', Who Seldom Left The Office Before 10 P.M., Sachiko Was As Conversant With Tea Ceremony And Classical Japanese Literature As With Rock Music, Goethe And Vivaldi. With The Lightness Of Touch That Made Video Night In Kathmandu So Captivating, Pico Iyer Fashions From Their Relationship A Marvelously Ironic Yet Heartfelt Book That Is At Once A Portrait Of Cross-Cultural Infatuation And Misunderstanding And A Delightfully Fresh Way Of Seeing Both The Old Japan And The Very New.

Een Engelstalig journalist van Indiase afkomst beschrijft aan de hand van zijn ervaringen in Azië de culturele invloed van het Westen op de mensen daar.