Video Night in Kathmandu
Page 45
Travel/Essays/978-1-4000-3103-0
TROPICAL CLASSICAL
Essays from Several Directions
In Tropical Classical, Iyer visits a holy city in Ethiopia where hooded worshipers 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 100,00 different workers. Iyer chats with the Dalai Lama and assesses books by 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. Overflowing with insight, and often laugh-out-loud funny, this is Pico Iyer at his globe-sprinting best.
Travel/Essays/978-0-679-77610-9
FALLING OFF THE MAP
Some Lonely Places of the World
What does the elegant nostalgia of Argentina have in common with the raffish nonchalance of Australia? And what do both these countries have in common with North Korea? They are “lonely places,” cut off from the rest of the world by geography, ideology, or sheer weirdness. And they have all attracted the attention of Pico Iyer, one of the finest travel writers ever to book a room in the Pyongyang Koryo hotel. Whether he is documenting the cruising rites of Icelandic teenagers, being interrogated by tipsy Cuban police, or summarizing the plot of Bhutan’s first feature film (“a $6,500 spectacular film about a star-crossed couple; she dies, he throws himself on the funeral pyre, and both live happily ever after as an ox and a cow”), Iyer is always uncannily observant and acerbically funny.
Travel/Adventure/978-0-679-74612-6
THE LADY AND THE MONK
Four Seasons in Kyoto
When 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, 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 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, 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 and Goethe. 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.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73834-3
ALSO AVAILABLE
Abandon, 978-1-4000-3085-9
Cuba and the Night, 978-0-679-76075-7
VINTAGE BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or
visit www.randomhouse.com
NEW FROM
PICO IYER
THE OPEN ROAD
The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
One of the most acclaimed and perceptive observers of globalism and Buddhism now gives us the first serious consideration—for Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike—of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s work and ideas as a politician, scientist, and philosopher. The Open Road illuminates the hidden life, the transforming ideas, and the daily challenges of a global icon.
Available in hardcover from Knopf
$24.00 (Canada: $28.00) • 978-0-307-26760-3
PLEASE VISIT WWW.AAKNOPF.COM
First Vintage Departures Edition, June 1989
Copyright © 1988 by Pico Iyer
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1988.
A portion of this work originally appeared in The Condé Nast Traveler.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: ABKCO Music, Inc.: Excerpts from the song lyrics “Only Sixteen,” words and music by Sam Cooke. Copyright © 1959 by ABKCO Music, Inc. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, Inc.: Excerpt from the song lyrics “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert and John Denver. Copyright © 1971 by Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Paul Simon Music: Excerpt from the song lyrics “The Boxer,” by Paul Simon. Copyright © 1968 by Paul Simon. Used by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Iyer, Pico.
Video night in Kathmandu: and other reports from the not-
so-far East/Pico Iyer. – 1st Vintage departures ed.
p. cm. – (Vintage departures)
eISBN: 978-0-307-76190-3
1. Asia – Description and travel – 1951– 2. East and West.
3. Iyer, Pico – Journeys – Asia. I. Title.
[DS10.187 1989]
950′.428 – dc19 88-40359
Author photo by Elizabeth Zeschin
v3.0