The stunning photographs in Living Faith are the result of over a decade and a half of travel and observation. From the cities, small towns and villages of India -- a country of almost unparalleled diversity where every major religion of the world has found a home -- Dinesh Khanna brings us images of faith as it endures in everyday life. Priests light up the night on the ghats of Varanasi in honor of Shiva; Sufis sing ecstatic love songs to Allah at the tomb of Nizamuddin Auliya; young boys in Ladakh prepare for the austere life of a Buddhist Lama; and devotees offer wax models of what they desire to Mary at her church in Mumbai. Meanwhile, on the highways and lanes of India, taxi and truck drivers carry on their dashboards little shrines to their gods; Jain nuns walk barefoot for miles on an eternal pilgrimage; and people stop along busy roads to offer prayers at modest temples and tombs. 
Living Faith is an intimate, revealing record of a deeply spiritual way of life. It acknowledges the strength of private worship and shared faith, which ultimately transcends the more visible but short-lived realities of discord.

Living Faith: Windows into the Sacred Life of India

Religion & Spirituality

IYER, PICO

Dinesh, Khanna

Hinduism

HarperOne

Falling off the map: some lonely places of the world

Travel

JONATHAN CAPE.

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. Pico Iyer has been engaged in conversation with the Dalai Lama (a friend of his father’s) for the last three decades—an ongoing 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 remotest, 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, rigor, 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.

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

KNOPF

We all carry people inside our heads—actors, leaders, writers, people out of history or fiction, met or unmet, who sometimes seem closer to us than people we know. In The Man Within My Head, Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer Graham Greene; he examines Greene’s obsessions, his elusiveness, his penchant for mystery. Iyer follows Greene’s trail from his first novel, The Man Within, to such later classics as The Quiet American and begins to unpack all he has in common with Greene: an English public school education, a lifelong restlessness and refusal to make a home anywhere, a fascination with the complications of faith. The deeper Iyer plunges into their haunted kinship, 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 Cuba to Bhutan, and moving, as Greene would, from Sri Lanka in war to intimate moments of introspection; trying to make sense of his own past, commuting between the cloisters of a fifteenth-century boarding school and California in the 1960s, one of our most resourceful explorers of crossing cultures gives us his most personal and revelatory book.

The Man Within My Head

Arts & Literature

For over three decades, Pico Iyer, one of our most cherished travel writers, has been a friend to the Dalai Lama. Over these years through intimate conversations, he has come to know him in a way that few can claim. Here he paints an unprecedented portrait of one of the most singular figures of our time, explaining the Dalai Lama's work and ideas about politics, science, technology, and religion. For Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike, The Open Road illuminates the hidden life and the daily challenges of this global icon.

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (Vintage Departures)

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Ever since he first discovered Graham Greene's work, Pico Iyer has felt a haunting closeness with the English writer. In The Man Within My Head, Iyer follows Greene's trail from his first novel, The Man Within, to such later classics as The Quiet American, examining Greene's obsessions, his elusiveness, and his penchant for mystery. The deeper he plunges into this exploration, the more Iyer begins to wonder whether the man within his head might not be Greene but his own father, or perhaps some more shadowy aspect of himself. Drawing upon experiences across the globe, from Cuba to Bhutan, and moving, as Greene would, from Sri Lanka in war to intimate moments of introspection, this is the most personal and revelatory book yet from one of our most astute observers of inner journeys and crossing cultures.

History

The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

Pico Iyer went to Kyoto and lived in a monastery for a time. He wanted to learn about Zen Buddhism and Japan and he wanted to get to know Kyoto. In Kyoto he met Sachiko, a typical bourgeois housewife locked into an arranged marriage. This is the story of Kyoto, Sachiko and the monk. The author also wrote "Video Night In Kathmandu".

The lady and the monk: Four seasons in Kyoto

Bodley Head

John Macmillan is an Englishman in California studying Sufism, and in particular Rumi, the thirteenth-century Islamic mystic and at present the best-selling poet in America. Traveling to Damascus, he hears rumors of a secret, heretical manuscript that might have escaped from Iran during the chaos of its Revolution, and, taking a message back to California, ends up encountering Camilla Jensen, an open if somewhat wayward Californian, who seems in some way connected to the world of fugitive texts. Following the trail of mystical poems through Spain and India to Iran, and trying to unravel the mystery that lies behind Camilla, John finds himself descending ever deeper into a world of passion and bewilderment. Then, suddenly, a manuscript appears, and Camilla disappears, leaving him closer to an understanding of some things, yet further from a real understanding of what is most important to him. Abandon is a mystical romance in the classic Persian tradition brought into the bleached sunlight of Southern California today. But it is also an unexpected and distinctive look at the clash between Islam and the West, at a time when Los Angeles is partly run by Iranian exiles and the long-closed cities of Iran are slowly opening up to Westerners. Eerie and incandescent, Abandon displays Iyer’s unique gift for showing the dance of dreams and desires and preconceptions that ensues when cultures collide.

Abandon: A Romance

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

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.

Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign

Travel Writing

The author of Video Night in Kathmandu ups the ante on himself in this sublimely evocative and acerbically funny tour through the world's loneliest and most eccentric places. From Iceland to Bhutan to Argentina, Iyer remains both uncannily observant and hilarious.

Falling Off The Map

Knopf Canada

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by IYER, PICO. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by IYER, PICO

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by IYER, PICO. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Living Faith: Windows into the Sacred Life of India

Falling off the map: some lonely places of the world

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

The Man Within My Head

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (Vintage Departures)

The Man Within My Head

The lady and the monk: Four seasons in Kyoto

Abandon: A Romance

Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign

Falling Off The Map