Join the Literary Journalism Program and the Department of History at The University of California, Irvine for a conversation between writers Pico Iyer and Amy Wilentz. Light refreshments; book sale and signing to follow. Free and open to the public. For more information, contact Patricia Pierson at piersonp@uci.edu.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Center for Asian Studies, the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, the Humanities Collective, the International Studies Program, and the World History MRU, with support from the Office of the Chancellor.

About Pico Iyer:

An essayist, columnist, and novelist, Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England in 1957, to parents from India, and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. Since 1986 he has been writing books and since 1992 he has been based in rural Japan, while spending part of each year in a Benedictine hermitage in California. www.picoiyerjourneys.com <http://www.picoiyerjourneys.com>

About Amy Wilentz:

Amy Wilentz (UC Irvine English and Literary Journalism) is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (1989), Martyrs’ Crossing (2000), and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger (2006). She edited and translated The Parish of the Poor (Orbis Books 1990), a collection of the writings of Haitian President and political leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide. She contributed the leading essay to the book Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary (Harper, 2008). Wilentz is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and also a 1990 nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles, Time magazine, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Harper’s, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Reconstruction, Travel & Leisure, The San Francisco Chronicle, More, The Village Voice, The London Review of Books and many other publications. She is the former Jerusalem correspondent of The New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation.

nprfreshair:

A Map of the World Based on Book Publishing

When it comes to book publishing, not all countries are created equal, as this distorted map of the world by the International Publishers Association shows. […]

As you can see, places like the U.S., Europe, and parts of Asia are engorged in illustration of their strong publishing industries. Meanwhile, Africa and the Middle East are tiny slivers, meaning that the number of books published in those places is extremely low compared to the rest of the world.

The map demonstrates the way that books and the industry behind them reflect access to knowledge,” according to the creators of the report.

[Image: International Publishers Association]

explore-blog:

Famous book covers ‘improved’ with more honest titles. Best thing since what Dr. Seuss books were really about.

LJ Digital: These are hilarious!