“Hyderabad in Five Colors,” for the New York Review of Books blog, September 5, 2013 “The Value of Suffering,” an essay for The New York Times, September 8, 2013 “Why I Love the National Geographic”–The Guardian, December 8, 2013; “Proust, The Accidental Buddhist”–New York Review of Books blog, December 24, 2013 “The City at the Center of […]
“Leonard Cohen burns, and we burn with him,” a 10-page meditation on the Zen singer-songwriter in Shambhala Sun magazine (April 2013); “Terrence Malick’s Song of Songs”–an appraisal of To the Wonder for Harpers.com, April 22, 2013; “Reading My Way to the Threshold of the Great Unanswerable”–a discussion with Patrick McMahon in Inquiring Mind magazine, Spring 2013; […]
If you’re interested in hearing Pico Iyer talk, here are a few dates and places to try: September 10 Altman Fellow Talk on Globalization, Miami University, Miami, Ohio September 12 Reading as Visiting Writer, St. Lawrence University Canton, New York October 8 Conversation with Katherine Boo, UCSB Arts & Lectures Santa Barbara, California October 9 […]
If you’re interested in hearing Pico Iyer talk, here are a few dates and places to try: June 13 Talk at TEDGlobal Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland September 10 Talk at Miami University, Miami, Ohio September 12 Reading as Visiting Writer, St. Lawrence University Canton, New York October 9 Conversation with Katherine Boo, Central Library Los Angeles, […]
An online discussion with New Zealand writer, Alexander Bisley, December, 2012, Mr. Bisley later used some of this in articles he wrote for the Dominion Post and other New Zealand papers. His website is http://lumiere.net.nz 1) “What means the fact—which is so common, so universal—that some soul that has lost all hope for itself can […]
In his great book of changes and home-made koans, Silence, John Cage defines the purpose of music. “Music is edifying,” the devoted student of D.T. Suzuki wrote, “for from time to time it sets the soul in operation. The soul is the gatherer-together of the disparate elements (Meister Eckhart), and its work fills one with […]
Japanese literature is often about nothing happening, because Japanese life is, too. There are few emphases in spoken Japanese—the aim is to remain as level, even as neutral as possible—and in a classic work like The Tale of Genji, as one recent translator has it, “The more intense the emotion, the more regular the meter.” […]
If you’re interested in hearing Pico Iyer talk, mostly in connection with his new book, The Man Within My Head, here are a few dates and places to try: January 10-13 Key West Literary Seminar: “Writers on Writers” Key West, Florida January 24-28 Jaipur Writers’ Festival Jaipur, India January 30-31 Kolkata Writers’ Festival Kolkata, India […]
(The following is an introduction to a new edition of Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse, published to mark the 50th anniversary of the author’s death and the 90th anniversary of the book’s first appearance, by Peter Owen, in August 2012). “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.” As an innocent fifteen year-old, incarcerated in […]
