Pico Iyer – författare

With contributions by: William Boyd, Candice Carty-Williams, Imtiaz Dharker, Roddy Doyle, Pico Iyer, Robert Macfarlane, Andy Miller, Jackie Morris, Jan Morris, Sisonke Msimang, Dina Nayeri, Chigozie Obioma, Michael Ondaatje, David Pilling, Max Porter, Philip Pullman, Alice Pung, Jancis Robinson, S.F.Said, Madeleine Thien, Salley Vickers, John Wood and Markus Zusak'This story, like so many stories, begins with a gift. The gift, like so many gifts, was a book...' So begins the essay by Robert Macfarlane that inspired this collection.In this cornucopia of an anthology, you will find essays by some of the world's most beloved novelists, nonfiction writers, essayists and poets.'You will see books taking flight in flocks, migrating around the world, landing in people's hearts and changing them for a day or a year or a lifetime.'You will see books sparking wonder or anger; throwing open windows into other languages, other cultures, other minds; causing people to fall in love or to fight for what is right.'And more than anything, over and over again, you will see books and words being given, received and read - and in turn prompting further generosity.'Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of global literacy non-profit, Room to Read, The Gifts of Reading forms inspiring, unforgettable, irresistible proof of the power and necessity of books and reading.Inspired by Robert MacfarlaneCurated by Jennie Orchard

This elegant collaboration pairs Michael Kenna’s luminous black-and-white landscapes with Pico Iyer’s contemplative prose, tracing the parallels of two lives lived in motion. Though they didn’t meet until they were both in their sixties, photographer Michael Kenna and writer Pico Iyer had been unknowingly following similar paths for decades. Both were born in England, studied near Oxford in the 1970s, moved to the U.S. West Coast, and fell in love with Japan.This book brings their work together in a profoundly personal collaboration: more than sixty of Kenna’s prints, each accompanied by an essay both from Iyer and Kenna himself. Kenna’s work—minimalist, often made in long exposure—captures fleeting moments of calm and clarity: a fog-bound canal in Venice, a deserted jetty in Mallorca, a line of trees dissolving into snow in Hokkaido. Spanning fifty years and five continents, these photographs offer meditations shaped by light, shadow, and quiet transformation. In prose that mirrors the restraint and depth of the images, Iyer writes about travel, childhood, coincidence, and the invisible threads that connect us.Beautifully printed and designed for slow reading and close looking, Same Sun Same Moon is a book for art lovers, writers, travelers, and anyone drawn to the subtle interplay of image and word, solitude and connection.

In the global village that our world has become, travel and technology fuel each other and us. "Everywhere is made up of everywhere else," motion is our most constant state of being, our very souls have been put into circulation. Yet, as Pico Iyer points out in his fresh, acutely observant, and witty new book, even a global person must have a home. Using his own multicultural upbringing (Indian, American, British) as a point of departure, Iyer sets out on a journey - both physical and psychological - toward a definition of home in this world gone mobile. He travels: to Los Angeles International Airport, where town life (shops, services, sociability) is available without a town; to Hong Kong, where hotels are self-contained communities; to Toronto, made cosmopolitan by its emigre population; to Atlanta, where the Olympic Village unintentionally commemorates the mass-produced universalism that shapes the games; to England, where the effects of empire-as-global-village are still being sorted out; and, to Japan, where Iyer unexpectedly, and finally, finds a home for himself.

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.

Pico Iyer has been engaged in conversation with the Dalai Lama (a friend of his father's) for the last three decades-a continuing exploration of his message and its effectiveness. Now, in this insightful, impassioned book, Iyer captures the paradoxes of the Dalai Lama's position: though he has brought the ideas of Tibet to world attention, Tibet itself is being remade as a Chinese province; though he was born in one of the most remote, least developed places on earth, he has become a champion of globalism and technology. He is a religious leader who warns against being needlessly distracted by religion; a Tibetan head of state who suggests that exile from Tibet can be an opportunity; an incarnation of a Tibetan god who stresses his everyday humanity.Moving from Dharamsala, India-the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile-to Lhasa, Tibet, to venues in the West where the Dalai Lama's pragmatism, rigour, and scholarship are sometimes lost on an audience yearning for mystical visions, The Open Road illuminates the hidden life, the transforming ideas, and the daily challenges of a global icon.

“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.

From one of our most astute observers, a haunting and unexpected investigation of the many voices he carries inside himself'The Man Within My Head is one of a handful of magical books that I have read straight through' Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph'There are three men in this virtuoso memoir: Iyer comes to a better understanding of himself, the virtual man in his head and, movingly, the lifetime bond with his real father' The TimesWe 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.

We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it's their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty.Returning to his home in Japan after his father-in-law's sudden death, Pico Iyer soon picks up the steadying patterns of his everyday rites: going to the post office in the day and engaging in spirited games of ping-pong in the evenings. But in a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honouring the dead, he soon finds himself grappling with the question we all have to live with: how to hold on to the things we love even though we know that they – and we – are dying.As the maple leaves begin to turn and the heat starts to soften, Iyer shows us a Japan we have seldom seen before through the season that reminds us to take nothing for granted.

Winner of the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2020How does a sushi bar explain a Japanese poem?Why do Japanese couples plan matching outfits for their honeymoon?Why are so many things in Japan the opposite of what we expect?After thirty-two years in Japan, Pico Iyer knows the country as few others can. In A Beginner's Guide to Japan, he dashes from baseball games to love-hotels and from shopping malls to zen temple gardens to find fresh ways of illuminating his adopted home. Playful and surreptitiously profound, this is a guidebook to a Japan few have ever seen before. 'Rarely in any writing on Japan is provocation so elegantly and surgically performed' Financial Times

'Nothing less than a guided tour of the human soul ... A masterpiece' Elizabeth Gilbert'A work of spiritual evolution [and] inner journeys told through extraordinary exteriors' Washington PostOne of our most perceptive travel writers embarks on an exploration of the world's holiest places and where we might find paradise on Earth.It’s so easy, I thought, to place Paradise in the past or the future – anywhere but here.After half a century of travel, Pico Iyer asks himself what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict. In a spectacular journey, both inward and outward, he roams the globe from Jerusalem to Belfast to North Korea, from crowded mosques in Iran to a holy mountain in Japan. By the end, he has upended any of our expectations and dared to suggest that we can find paradise right in the heart of our angry and confused world.

'Beautiful . . . Iyer masterfully and lyrically shows us how we may need to find a new home - one far more solemn, communal and silent than our present one - in order to return properly to ourselves' Alain de Botton'I trust that reading this book may help many to lead lives of greater compassion and deeper peace of mind' His Holiness the Dalai Lama'One of the most soulful and perceptive writers of our time' Maria Popova'An exquisite call to silence and the myriad connections it kindles' Katherine May'I urge everyone to read Pico Iyer's beautifully written, meditative book Learning from Silence. As I turned to this I felt my blood pressure reducing, and I began to read in a different, slower and more concentrated way' Jane Shaw, Financial TimesFrom the bestselling author of The Art of Stillness, a revelatory exploration of the abiding clarity and calm to be found in quiet retreatOver the past three decades, Pico Iyer has made more than a hundred journeys to a small hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He's not a Christian, nor a member of any religious group, and yet his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence.In Learning from Silence, Iyer travels deep into inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant change: houses burn, a parent dies, a daughter is diagnosed with cancer. He shares the revelations he experiences, alongside wisdom from other non-monastics who have learned from adversity and inwardness. 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, Learning from Silence 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.