Tibet in Exile: An Interview with Pico Iyer

BORN IN Oxford, raised in California, a resident of Japan, Pico Iyer has captured his itinerant life with books and essays that document his journeys to Nepal, Cuba, and most recently, Tibet. He speaks with Dissent’s Jon Wiener (“The Weatherman Temptation,” spring 2007) about his new book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

Jon Wiener:  There are six million Tibetans.  But you write in your new book that Tibet today is “slipping ever closer to extinction.” Those are chilling words.

Pico Iyer:  I wish they ... More

Speech Patterns: An Interview with Richard Price

After writing novels located primarily in the Bronx and New Jersey, New York-native Richard Price has written a new novel, Lush Life, that captures the vivacity of life and language in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Dissent’s Jon Wiener (“The Weatherman Temptation,” spring 2007) interviewed him this month.

Jon Wiener: Lush Life involves several worlds that exist side by side on the Lower East Side today—tell us about them.
Richard Price:  Right now it seems like the place belongs to young, white middle-class kids in their twenties.  It... More

Growing Up Radical: An Interview with Peter Carey

Peter Carey has won two Booker prizes: the first for Oscar and Lucinda, which was made into a movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett; the second for The True History of the Kelly Gang, which sold two-million copies worldwide.  In 1990, he moved from Australia to New York and wrote My Life as a Fake and Theft. Now he has published his tenth novel, His Illegal Self, which tells the story of Che, the seven-year-old son of wanted SDS radicals. Dissent contributor Jon Wiener (More

Arctic Jews: An Interview with Michael Chabon

Like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Michael Chabon’s newest novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is set in a counterfactual world. In Chabon’s retelling of history, the U.S. permitted European Jews fleeing Hitler to settle in Sitka, a small fishing town in Alaska. After the 1948 defeat of the nascent state of Israel, the city becomes the improbable center of a new Jewish homeland—one where the language remains primarily Yiddish. The book is, among other things, a gripping murder mystery set in the “present” as the settlement is preparing to revert back to... More