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White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

by Geoff Dyer (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2016

    $5.25
Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR From one of Britain's most original writers, White Sands is a creative exploration of why we travel. Episodic, wide-ranging, funny and smart, the linked journeys recall the themes of Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It - albeit with the wisdom of (middle) age. From a trip to the Lightning Field in New Mexico, to chasing Gauguin's ghost in French Polynesia, from falling for someone who may or may not be a tour guide in Beijing's Forbidden City, to tracking down the house of an intellectual hero in Los Angeles, Dyer pursues all permutations of the peak experience including the trough experience. In his trademark style he blends travel writing, essay, criticism and fiction with a smart and cantankerous wit that is unmatched. This is a book for armchair travellers and procrastinating philosophers everywhere.

$5.25

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 240
 Edition: Main
 Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
Published: 30 Jun 2016
ISBN 10: 1782117407
ISBN 13: 9781782117407

Media Reviews
Brilliant . . . Dyer's eyes miss nothing -- PETER CONRAD * * Observer * *
Even Chekhov might have envied Geoff Dyer's talent . . . Almost perfect. -- JAN MORRIS * * Spectator * *
[A] disregard for genre boundaries is a hallmark of his work, along with erudition, a brilliant use of language and irreverent humour . . . The nearest thing to White Sands in Dyer's back catalogue is Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It * * Daily Telegraph * *
Surpassingly eloquent . . . there's no other writer quite like Dyer * * Time * *
Illuminating . . . A collection unified by a focus on our impermanence. Why are we here? Dyer asks. With his customary elegance of thought, he sees that our attempts to transcend our situation through travel and art are motivated by our awareness of our final destination: We are here to go somewhere else . -- LUKE BROWN * * Financial Times * *
A national treasure -- ZADIE SMITH
Dyer's virtue is not the whole-hearted embrace of experience and exotic locales but the parsing of degrees of disappointment. He also doesn't pretend to be heading anywhere, but then White Sands turns into a memoir and becomes unexpectedly moving . . . Dyer's tone as he relates his frightening brush with tragedy is calm and full of curiosity, possibly as a result of eschewing drama for his entire life. -- JANE SMILEY * * Los Angeles Times * *
White Sands isn't just a catalog of travel mishaps, with Mr. Dyer cast as an English-speaking Monsieur Hulot. It is also a rumination on the meanings we assign the strange destinations of our pilgrimages. * * New York Times * *
Reading Dyer is akin to the sudden elation and optimism you feel when you make a new friend, someone as silly as you but cleverer too, in whose company you know you will travel through life more vagrantly, intensely, joyfully * * Daily Telegraph * *
Quite possibly the best living writer in Britain * * Daily Telegraph * *
Geoff Dyer is a true original - one of those rare voices in contemporary literature that never ceases to surprise, disturb and delight -- William Boyd
Author Bio
Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as nine non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E.M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ's Writer of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.