To my eye, the whole operation looked like a drilling rig for oil or gas. Across the horizon, flanking the junction points where the pipes converged, I could see voluminous chimneys, structures that seemed emblematic of our toxic industrial age. Yet the gas spilling from their gaping mouths was a mostly harmless vapor. Cannata and his team weren’t drilling for hydrocarbons. They were drilling for steam. “You can use the same tools,” said Cannata, who’d started his career in the oil and gas industry in India and Peru before switching to geothermal at Enel, Italy’s largest energy company. “But the process, and the result, is totally different.”
As an anthropologist specializing in health and medicine, laughter isn’t really in my professional wheelhouse—unless you subscribe to the view that laughter is the best medicine. My interest in the topic is more personal, not just because of my history as a former Giggling Gertie, but because it’s a behavior that is much less straightforward than it seems.
When I found the writer Sanmao, I immediately wanted to layer my life over hers like a palimpsest.
It was a familiar feeling: I’d mimicked great Asian American women throughout my childhood as if I were a scarecrow—Sandra Oh, Margaret Cho, Amy Tan—maintaining only the illusion of likeness from a distance. But when I read Stories of the Sahara, the first of Sanmao’s books to be translated into English, I felt like I’d finally grazed the mark that indicated I was tall enough to ride—the one scratched at the height of a Taiwanese travel writer.
Questions of identity — who we are, where we came from, what we will be — have long been a fundamental part of mystery fiction. To solve a mystery, the sleuth must discover more about themselves, as does the young woman at the center of the atmospheric “The Lost House.”
Pico Iyer’s readers know him as an inviting paradox, a travel writer who savors standing still. Iyer lives in Japan, where he has a wife and family, and California, where he’s a frequent guest at New Camaldoli Hermitage, run by Benedictine monks. Iyer’s books chronicle journeys to many parts of the world, including Cuba, Iran, India, North Korea, and Iceland.
In a counterpoint to his busy career, Iyer has for several decades visited New Camaldoli in Big Sur. He’s written about the hermitage before, but “Aflame” delves more deeply into his favorite retreat. The book’s title draws from a Christian proverb about spiritual transformation: “If you so wish, you can become aflame.”