A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

A monk's cell in a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, is not your ordinary writer's retreat. But then TIME Contributor Pico Iyer is not your ordinary writer. For one thing, he travels a lot. For the past eight months he has used Kyoto -- either the temple or a tiny apartment in the ancient city -- as a base camp for his forays around Japan and into the Himalayas. Iyer's trips have provided grist for a book in progress and recent TIME stories on the Dalai Lama and Tokyo Disneyland. "I try to catch the inner stirrings of a country," he says. "Over the past year I observed the summer solstice in Iceland, attended the Wimbledon tennis matches and went to Cuba for Carnaval." Iyer, 31, can focus his attention on something as small as the comma, the subject of his essay in this week's magazine, or as vast as China, which fills a chapter of his just published travel book, Video Night in Kathmandu (Knopf; $19.95).

Born in England of Indian parents, Iyer immigrated to California when he was seven, and soon began commuting 5,500 miles back to Britain to attend Eton and then Oxford, where he took a master's degree in English. Betwixt and between, Iyer traveled. When he was 17, he toured by bus through half a dozen Latin American countries. Eventually, he quit globe-trotting long enough to pick up another master's degree, at Harvard, where he also taught for two years before signing on as a staff writer for TIME in 1982. (He accepted the job from a pay phone in Sardinia.)

Three years later, Iyer took a leave of absence from TIME to explore Asia in greater depth. That trip resulted in Video Night, a series of lively meditations on the blending of Eastern and Western culture overseas. He became a contributor in 1986, and is now spending a year in Kyoto. His second book, he declares, will be an introspective work "about staying in one place; about discovering roots and angling for depths. It will be a travel book about an inner adventure." This summer and fall he intends to spend time in London, Southeast Asia, Seoul (for the Olympics) and Bhutan. Whew!

Just before leaving Moscow last week, President Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev on behalf of an aide for a souvenir of the historic meeting: his autograph. Reagan then produced the Jan. 4, 1988, issue of TIME that named Gorbachev Man of the Year and had him sign the cover. We were happy to be of service.