![]() Are these the facets you set out to discover? It just ended up that way. At one point, you acknowledge that you are essentially a British intellectual author in Tahiti complaining about Gauguin complaining about Tahiti, an irony you seem fully aware of and embrace. But maybe I should qualify that further: most of the time I felt like a writer having trouble writing-which is a writer not getting anywhere. Did you feel at times that you were writing about a writer traveling? I just felt like a writer writing-which is a form of travel, I suppose. So much of this book seems to be about traveling, focusing on interludes of waiting, wondering, on long thoughts that depart from a place and, rather than return back to where you started, lead us somewhere new. And then I thought there might be something about the Adorno house and Watts Towers that would fit in thematically with other stuff in the book-and after I'd been to these places I saw that they also knitted up or provided some kind of resolution of those themes. Was there any rhyme or reason in choosing the locations you ended up traveling to? It was pretty random, but they were all places I'd been wanting to go to for one reason or another. With his trademark wit, Dyer examines a host of seemingly unrelated landscapes across the globe: Tahiti, where he is in search of himself searching for Gaugin the Forbidden City in the impersonal sprawl of Beijing an obscure land art project in remote New Mexico from Oslo north into Svalbard's endless dark points across the great American West and, finally, Los Angeles. White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World (Pantheon, May 2016) is his newest collection. His books have been translated into 24 languages. The author of four novels and nine works of nonfiction, Dyer is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. Forster Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism and, in 2015, the Windham Campbell Prize for nonfiction. ![]() Robert Gray, contributing editorĪ Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Geoff Dyer has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E.M. Now Go Out There: (and Get Curious) by Mary Karr, based on the bestselling author's 2015 commencement address at Syracuse University, in which she advised: "Being curious and compassionate can take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder." Apt advice for graduating readers. Stuff Every Graduate Should Know: A Handbook for the Real World by Alyssa Favreau, who offers advice for post-college life, including how to find your first apartment, build a grown-up wardrobe and take care of yourself when you're sick.ġ00 Years: Wisdom from Famous Writers on Every Year of Your Life by Joshua Prager and Milton Glaser, featuring inspirational passages from Arthur Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Maya Angelou and more.īrave Enough by Cheryl Strayed, a collection of quotations-"mini instruction manuals for the soul"-drawn from her writing that seek to capture the author's wisdom, courage and outspoken humor. There are, however, so many great choices, including a few recently published titles worth considering for your graduate this year:Īdvice from My 80-Year-Old Self: Real Words of Wisdom from People Ages 7 to 88 by the late artist Susan O'Malley, who asked more than 100 people what counsel they would offer their younger selves, then transformed the responses into text-based images.Ĭallings: The Purpose and Passion of Work by Stor圜orps founder Dave Isay, which features tales of passion, courage and commitment, chronicling individuals as they pursue the work they were born to do. Personally, I'd have liked to receive a gift box containing Emerson's journals and Jack Kerouac's novel Dharma Bums, since those were the books I read most during my first decade after graduation. Seuss as a graduation gift at least once? I see everyone raised their hands, but this perennial bestseller and reliable sign of spring is not the only option for scholars on your commencement shopping list. Pop quiz: Who has given Oh, the Places You'll Go! by Dr. ![]()
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