From “one of our most original writers” (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine) comes an expansive and exacting book—firmly grounded but elegant, often hilarious, and always inquisitive—about travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves.   Geoff Dyer’s restless search— for what? is unclear, even to him—continues in this series of fascinating adventures and pilgrimages: with a tour guide who may not be a tour guide in the Forbidden City in Beijing; with friends in New Mexico, where D. H. Lawrence famously claimed to have had his “greatest experience from the outside world”; with a hitchhiker picked up on the way from White Sands; with Don Cherry (or a photo of him, at any rate) at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.   Weaving stories about places to which he has recently traveled with images and memories that have persisted since childhood, Dyer tries “to work out what a certain place—a certain way of marking the landscape—means; what it’s trying to tell us; what we go to it for.” With 4 pages of full-color illustrations. “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. ‘White Sands’ is a short book, brisk, hard to take and worth the attempt, just the sort of paradox Dyer most enjoys.” — Jane Smiley, Los Angeles Times “Surpassingly eloquent….there’s no other writer quite like Dyer….The real action is in the lively intercourse between Dyer’s mind and the outside world….An essential part of travel is the inevitable sense that wherever you’ve gotten to isn’t quite what you hoped it would be—just as you yourself are never, not completely, the traveler you thought you would be.” — Lev Grossman, Time “With philosophical incisiveness, Dyer extols the virtue of landscape to conjure in himself the tangible and the mirage, the real and the illusion, the possessed object and the desired object. There is an undeniable joy throughout Dyer's writing, an affirmation that travel and the experience of place—not merely being someplace, but being present in it—is a gateway to the humanity of past, present, and future. A mesmerizing compendium that reflects on time, place, and just what, exactly, we are doing here.” —Kirkus *starred review* “‘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….Mr. Dyer is keenly, almost achingly, aware of our own impermanence. His imagination, you could say, has a built-in time-lapse function. He sees a lifetime of past and future boredom in a museum guard’s face; the sight of a particular soccer field immediately induces ‘a vision of its own demise’; ‘The Lightning Field’ makes him wonder what aliens will make of it long after humans are gone.” — Jennifer Senior, The New York Times “What is the point of anything, really? That’s the basis for much, maybe most, of the comedy in this world. And that’s the basis for the singularly entertaining oeuvre of the writer Geoff Dyer, who takes a headlong interest in things — ideas, places, works of art — only to fall back on his default position: prone, and despairing. In his ninth nonfiction book (he’s also turned out four novels and several essay collections), the very droll Dyer makes a series of pilgrimages, then wonders what all the fuss was about. The fact that the reader knows that this will be his reaction takes away nothing from the amusement, and occasional enlightenment, of the journey. That’s Dyer’s specialty.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Reasons to read Dyer, a critic, novelist, and creative nonfiction writer with a clutch of prestigious awards: he is an exhilaratingly superb stylist who uses his literary might and artistic and cultural erudition to express irreverent and irascible opinions and philosophical musings. And when he is in travelogue mode, as he is here, his observations are stunning in their candor about disappointment (his heart, he tells us, ‘is prone to sinking’) and acidly hilarious….Wherever he goes (Watts Towers, the Forbidden City), Dyer reports on the glorious complexities of both outer and inner worlds with acerbity, delving intelligence, and disarming and profound wit.” —Booklist “Any writer in need of a story should just get out there and pick up a hitchhiker. Literature may not want for hitchhiking stories, but you can never have too many. The best I’ve read lately is the title essay in  White Sands , Geoff Dyer’s new collection of travel writing…. White Sands  is chockablock with memorable pieces—a trip to Gauguin’s “babelicious” Tahiti, a stay at De Maria