Lyceum Agency - Issues & Ideas - Travel, Culture & Food

Travel, Culture & Food

Diana Abu-Jaber
Author │ Journalist │ Essayist

"I grew up inside the shape of my father’s stories. A Jordanian immigrant, Dad regaled us with tales about himself, his country, and his family that both entertained us and instructed us about the place he’d come from and the way he saw the world. These stories exerted a powerful influence on my imagination, in terms of what I chose to write about, the style of my language, and the form my own stories took.

Selected Books: Origin, The Language of Baklava, Crescent

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John Berendt
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Essayist

Armed with the verve and stylistic brevity of a columnist and the seasoned perspective of an editor, John Berendt wrote the modern classic Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story over the course of seven years, without a publisher’s advance. “People thought I was crazy, but I didn’t want to meet a deadline or owe money,” he says.

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Gary Braasch

Ana Castillo

Author │ Essayist │ Poet

“An always skilled storyteller, [Castillo] grounds her writing in . . . humor, love, suspense and heartache–that draw the reader in.”

–Chicago Sunday Sun-Times

In novels, short stories, poems, and essays, Castillo explores what Ibis Gomez-Vega has called “those segments of the American population often separated by class, economics, gender, and sexual orientation.” Castillo’s works nevertheless transcend boundaries of politics, class, and gender, making her “one of a few Mexican American writers who have attracted the attention of the mainstream reading public” (Ibis Gomez-Vega). Castillo’s prose blends elements of oral history and established literary tradition with innovation and experimentation: she has been called “the most daring and experimental of Latino novelists” (Ilan Stavans).

Selected Books: The Guardians, So Far From God

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Dr. Brian Fagan
Author │ Archaeologist │ Climate Change Historian

Dr. Brian Fagan is a leading authority on the complex relationship between the environment, climate change and human society. Fagan is the author or editor of 46 books, including eight college textbooks familiar to two generations of archaeology students. For audiences ranging from business executives to high school students, Fagan places today’s highly publicized climate crisis in a crucial historical context and describes how humans have adapted to environmental changes over the eons.

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Elizabeth Gilbert
Bestselling Author │ Short Story Writer │ Memoirist

Oprah Winfrey calls her a “rock star author.” Annie Proulx calls her “a writer of incandescent talent.” A New York magazine editor calls her the “Queen of Quirk,” and goes on to say, “She has an awful lot of humor and charm, and she’s one of those few writers who writes the way she talks.” And talks the way she writes, we might add—with intelligence, wit and not just a shade of the performer behind her expressive and insightful presentations.

Selected Books: The Last American Man, Eat Pray Love, Committed

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John Hodgman
Author │ Humorist │ Minor TV Personality

Before he went on television, JOHN HODGMAN was a humble writer, expert, and Former Professional Literary Agent living in New York City. In this capacity, he has served as the Humor Editor for the New York Times Magazine, Occasional Flight vs. Invisibility Consultant on “This American Life,” Advice Columnist for McSweeney’s, Comic Book Reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and a Freelance Journalist specializing in Food, Non-Wine Alcohol, “Battlestar Galactica,” and most other subjects.

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Sue Monk Kidd
Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Essayist

Sue Monk Kidd’s stunning bestselling debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees (2002), has enchanted critics and readers alike, bringing her literary renown and establishing her as one of the most popular writers working today. Taught widely in colleges and high schools, The Secret Life of Bees is Southern storytelling at its finest and is fast becoming a modern classic. The novel has spent more than two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list, sold six million copies, and been translated into 23 languages. It was produced onstage in New York and was made into an award-winning movie released in the fall of 2008. Barnes and Noble listed The Secret Life of Bees as the sixth bestselling book of the decade.

Selected Books: The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair

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Dr.

Christopher Phillips
Bestselling Author │ Founder, Constitution & Socrates Cafés │ Social Entrepreneur

“To date, Phillips has orchestrated discussions on … Solomonic topics at nursing homes, maximum-security prisons, churches, homeless shelters, bookstores and coffeehouses across the country, gently prodding students, urban professionals, unreconstructed slackers, street people and others to share their worldviews and scrutinize their most basic assumptions.”

–Los Angeles Times

Christopher Phillips has a passion for inquiry. A foremost specialist in the Socratic Method, he reminds us that we ought to ask questions – “not about any chance question,” as Socrates put it in Plato’s Republic, “but about the way one should live.”

Selected Books: Constitution Café, Six Questions of Socrates, Socrates Café.

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Julie Powell
Bestselling Author │ Memoirist │ Blogger

On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, stuck in a dead-end secretarial job, living in a hideous apartment in Long Island City, Queens, and dreading what seemed like a life of terminal mediocrity, I came up with a panicked notion—to cook through all 524 recipes of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a year, and blog about it. Julie and Julia describes my efforts to hold on to my job, marriage, and sanity while blazing a nonsensical trail toward fulfillment,with Julia leading the way."

Julie Powell

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Jonathan Raban
Novelist │ Travel Writer │ Essayist

In an era of sometimes disorienting global change, a writer like Jonathan Raban offers avenues for understanding and exploration. A prolific and influential travel writer, Raban focuses on places that have been both idolized and demonized in global culture: London, the Middle East, the American West. At once lyrical and sardonic, Raban’s writing has been called “vivid and utterly idiosyncratic” (Publishers Weekly).

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David Oliver Relin
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Human Rights Advocate

"We Americans need to learn from our mistakes, from the flailing, ineffective way we, as a nation, conducted the 'war-on-terror' after the attacks of 9/11, and from the way we’ve failed to make our case to the moderate, peace-loving majority of people at the heart of the Muslim World. If we want to heal the wounded relationship between Islam and the West, we have to learn how to wage peace as aggressively as we wage war."

—David Oliver Relin

Selected Books: Three Cups of Tea, See How They Shine (Random House, forthcoming 2011)

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Paul Theroux
Novelist │ Travel Writer │ Short Story Writer │ Critic

Paul Theroux is described by his friend, writer Jonathan Raban, as “utterly American, possessing all of those democratic, Yankee, can do qualities.” Theroux is the quintessential explorer who has a talent for noticing the odd, compelling detail.

Readers depend on his uncompromising, sometimes brazen reportage; audiences remember him for his witty, acerbic asides and the tremendous breadth of literature with which he is intimately familiar. Theroux is an avid, impassioned reader and literary scholar. His relentless enthusiasm for the pursuit of new discoveries and an abiding respect and affection for his readers and audience are abundantly evident in person. "It’s like a friendship [with the reader],” Theroux says of being an author. “A bond develops if you write a lot of books.”

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William T. Vollmann
Novelist │ Short Story Writer │ Journalist

William T. Vollmann is a monster, a monster of talent, ambition and accomplishment."

—Los Angeles Times

Distinctive for his boundless ambition and extraordinary output—23 books to date, counting the seven-volume, 3,352-page, Rising Up and Rising Down series—Vollmann fully inhabits two often polarized literary worlds. “One of the most unnerving aspects [of Vollmann's work]….is his combination of journalistic immediacy with profound moral inquiry” (Chicago Tribune). That duality has earned him comparisons to Thomas Pynchon.

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Edmund White
Novelist │ Memoirist │ Biographer │Social Critic

Edmund White is America’s preeminent gay writer. In biography, social history, travel writing, journalism, the short story, and the novel, this prolific and versatile author has chronicled the gay experience in the United States from the closeted 1950’s through the AIDS crisis. But as William Goldstein wrote in Publishers Weekly, “To call Edmund White merely a gay writer is to oversimplify his work and his intentions.” The acuity, insight, and compassion with which White explores the human condition transcends such a label.

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