Sun After Dark : Flights Into The Foreign

One of the best travel writers now at work in the English language brings back the sights and sounds from a dozen different frontiers. A cryptic encounter in the perfumed darkness of Bali; a tour of a Bolivian prison, conducted by an enterprising inmate; a nightmarish taxi ride across southern Yemen, where the men with guns may be customs inspectors or revolutionaries–these are just three of the stops on Pico Iyer’s latest itinerary.
But the true subject of Sun After Dark is the dislocations of the mind in transit. And so Iyer takes us along to meditate with Leonard Cohen and talk geopolitics with the Dalai Lama. He navigates the Magritte-like landscape of jet lag, “a place that no human had ever been until forty or so years ago.” And on every page of this poetic and provocative book, he compels us to redraw our map of the world.

Follows the psychologically significant forays of a cultural journalist to such sites as a Bolivian prison, a hidden monastery in Tibet, and the Khmer Rouge killing fields of Cambodia, a journey during which he met such individuals as Kazuo Ishiguro, the Dalai Lama, and W. G. Sebald. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.