{"product_id":"a-sense-of-direction-isbn-9781594631498","title":"A Sense of Direction","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn medieval times, a pilgrimage gave the average Joe his only break from the daily grind. For Gideon Lewis-Kraus, it promises a different kind of escape.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDetermined to avoid the fear and self-sacrifice that kept his father, a gay rabbi, closeted until midlife, he has moved to anything-goes Berlin. But the surfeit of freedom there has begun to paralyze him, and when a friend extends a drunken invitation to join him on an ancient pilgrimage route across Spain, Lewis-Kraus packs his bag, grateful for the chance to wake each morning with a sense of direction.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIrreverent, moving, hilarious, and thought-provoking, \u003ci\u003eA Sense of Direction \u003c\/i\u003eis Lewis-Kraus’s dazzling riff on the perpetual war between discipline and desire, and its attendant casualties. Across three pilgrimages and many hundreds of miles, he completes an idiosyncratic odyssey to the heart of a family mystery and a human dilemma: How do we come to terms with what has been and what is—and find a way forward, with purpose?“Beautiful, often very funny… Lewis-Kraus weaves a story that is both searching and purposeful, one that forces the reader, like the pilgrim, to value the journey as much as the destination.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A long walk to self-discovery that speaks eloquently of our times.” \u003ci\u003e–NPR.org\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Gideon Lewis-Kraus has written a very honest, very smart, very moving book about being young and rootless and even wayward. With great compassion and zeal he gets at the question: why search the world to solve the riddle of your own heart?\" –\u003ci\u003eDave Eggers\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Here is one of the best and most brilliant young writers in America.” –\u003ci\u003eGQ\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Charming and disarming… a wonderful exploration of the stories we tell ourselves.\" –\u003ci\u003eT: The New York Times Style Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A witty, deeply felt memoir… an honest, incisive grappling with the brute fact… that we only have one life to live… sparkles with tight, nearly aphoristic observations.\" –\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Nail[s] our collective anxiety—every sentence rings true… Lewis-Kraus is a master.” –\u003ci\u003eDaily Beast\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Rightfully anticipated literary debut.” –\u003ci\u003eNylon\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A complicated meditation on what the physical act of pilgrimage can mean in modern society… [with] moments of brilliant philosophical insight.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Onion AV Club\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Lewis-Kraus does nothing if not dazzle on the sentence level. But his commentary isn't just pretty; it's deeply self-aware.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Cleveland Plain Dealer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Gorgeously written… [Lewis-Kraus is] aimless, sure, but meticulously, obsessively, beautifully so.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Rumpus\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A young writer seeks a cure for his fecklessness by following roads very much taken in this scintillating travel memoir… Lewis-Kraus’s vivid descriptive powers and funny, shaggy-dog philosophizing [yield] an entertaining, thoughtful portrait of a slacker caught up in life’s quest for something.” –\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Physically, Lewis-Kraus’ feats are staggering, but more so is how fully and fluidly he recounts them, alongside meditation on his own youthful anxieties and a well-synthesized history of the act of pilgrimage.” –\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If David Foster Wallace had written \u003ci\u003eEat, Pray, Love\u003c\/i\u003e, it might have come close to approximating the adventures of Gideon Lewis-Kraus. \u003ci\u003eA Sense of Direction \u003c\/i\u003eis the digressively brilliant and seriously hilarious account of a fellow neurotic's wanderings, and his hard-won lessons in happiness, forgiveness, and international pilgrim fashion.” –Gary Shteyngart\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is a brilliant meditation on what the spiritual and fraternal and paternal and communal might mean to a person right now, fueled as it is by the funny, thorny, dreamy, generous, cranky, rigorous, truth-seeking voice of Gideon Lewis-Kraus.  For the sake of whatever force or idea or feeling sustains you, make a pilgrimage to your nearest bookstore and buy the goddamn book.” –Sam LipsyteGideon Lewis-Kraus has written for \u003ci\u003eHarper's\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Believer\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eWired\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eMcSweeney's\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eGQ\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSlate\u003c\/i\u003e, and other publications. For the moment he lives in Brooklyn.\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePrologue: Tallinn\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMy  friend Tom was trapped at home in a tiny, distant city. He had no  Estonian visa, and he knew if he left Tallinn he'd be unable to return.  More immediately problematic was the Russian stripper he'd been flirting  with, or, more specifically, her boy­friend, who had taken to hanging  around Tom's front door. Tom pleaded with me to visit, confident the guy  wouldn't take on the two of us.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTom  and I didn't know each other all that well then, nothing like later, but  it sounded like a fun excuse for a trip. Unlike Tom, I could leave my  apartment in Berlin whenever I wanted — I had a German freelancer's visa  and no cuckolded Baltic criminals camped out on my stoop — and was, in  fact, spending more time away than at home. By that point Berlin often  left me feeling at loose ends, and one of the things I had come to like  most about living there was how easy it was never to be in town. A lot  of my friends had already moved on, had gone back to resume their real  lives in New York, and I myself was beginning to wonder if it wasn't  time to pack it in. It was unclear where I'd go, though, mostly because  no­where was more appealing than Berlin had once been, should have been  still. I'd been living in lovely, provincial San Francisco and had moved  to Berlin because I'd felt I was missing out on something exciting, and  now I was on the brink of leaving lively, provisional Berlin because I  was afraid I was missing out on something serious. A quarter lifetime of  anecdotal evidence suggested, however, that once I actually motivated  myself to move somewhere I considered serious, somewhere like  New York — where I had never actually lived for very long but where, I  imagined, I would find myself ready to get on with the routines and  attachments that make for a real life (cat, yoga, a relationship) — I  would once again regret missing all the novelty diverting people  elsewhere. Maybe not New York, then. Maybe Kiev. I'd heard Kiev was  cheap and cool. I often reminded myself to look into it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTom  and I held in common the hope that there might be a geo­graphic ticket  out of the problems of indecision, boredom, and the sus­picion that more  interesting things were happening in more fashionable places to more  attractive people. Actually, that last part was my worry; in Tom's  version, less interesting things were happening in contemplative places  to more industrious people. Tom had moved to Tallinn with the idea he'd  be pressed into productivity there, that the constraint of its distance  and exoticism would force him to focus on the work he'd been neglecting  in favor of video games and the more dissipated varieties of recreation.  I'd moved to Berlin precisely for its lack of constraint, hoping that  its sense of vast possibility would help me figure out what I wanted.  Needless to say, for reasons that went beyond Russian strippers, it  wasn't really working out for either of us. Tom's claustrophobia left  him desperate for distraction, and my distraction left me desperate for  discipline. We were like two ships waiting for a breeze that might float  us past each other in the night.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTom  picked me up at the tiny airport in a taxi and brought me up to date. \"I  was living in Saigon,\" he said, \"and after a year I had to leave  be­cause my life was spinning out of control. Then I was living in Rome,  and I had to leave after six months because my life was spinning out of  con­trol. Then I moved to Las Vegas, and I had to leave there, too, very quickly, because my life was definitely once again spinning out of control.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"You were having trouble keeping yourself together in Rome, so you moved to Vegas?\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"So  I left Vegas and I thought to myself, okay, I need to finish this  long-overdue book, so I'll go to a small, distant country with an  impos­sible language and I'll just sit and write all day until the book  is done. I came here.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe looked out  the window at the looming medieval spires of the old town, where he was  paying Manhattan rent to live in the lavishly restored fourteenth  century. \"And now I can say, with utter confidence, that my life is  spinning out of control.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI hadn't  known Tom long enough to presume to tell him how to live. Besides, he  was a successful writer I admired and had long wished I might one day  resemble. He was only six years older than me, not quite enough to make  him a paternal figure but enough to make him a guide, and I preferred to  think of him as somewhat more together than he liked to suggest. I  assumed that despite his life's apparent mismanagement there must be  some greater logic to it. Plus he was living out a somewhat distorted  but still recognizable version of my own fantasy: skipping club lines  with future Baltic dictators, then until-dawn depravity with minor  Baltic celebrities. The best thing I could do for him, I decided, was to  provide him with company and reverence.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat  I chiefly remember about the four-day jag that followed is wak­ing up  in my bed, peering at my uncharacteristically unread email, and  realizing that I was back in Berlin. I had vague recollections of  sitting in an idling cab outside a Soviet-era tower block on the  outskirts of Tallinn, and of spending an evening in the company of some  Siberian dancers and the man being groomed to lead Estonia's next  nationalist front, and of gazing through a bobbing porthole at some gray  sea while Tom let his forehead cool against a Formica table. I looked  at my camera to discover a few blurry images of what I have come to  believe was probably Helsinki. The only other clue was a page in my  little notebook, where I'd managed one note in four days: \"Camino de  Santiago — sense of purpose — June 10.\" I'd underlined \"purpose.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis  Camino business sounded vaguely familiar. The internet duti­fully  reported that in the year A.D. 813, the alleged bones of the apostle St.  James the Greater were unearthed in Santiago de Compostela, in far  northwestern Spain. St. James had supposedly evangelized as far afield  as Galicia — unlikely, Tom says — before he was martyred in  first-century Palestine. His relics were said to have arrived at the  Atlantic coast, then the presumed end of the world, in a stone boat,  where they remained buried under a hermitage until their discovery eight  centuries later. A pilgrimage to the site started up within the next  hundred years, probably along the old trail of a pagan death cult. (The  Iberian Celts walked to the end of the earth to watch the sun perish  nightly into the sea.) Around 1140 the Codex Calixtinus appeared, a book  that's part how-to and part spiritual advice, and that has come to be  regarded as the world's first travel guide — the route is also credited  with the invention of the souve­nir tchotchke — and since that time the  Camino de Compostela has seen a more or less continuous parade of  redemptive aspiration. Over the past twenty years, in no small part  thanks to the efforts of a dopey German television comedian, the  pilgrimage has become popular with a secular crowd. It's about nine  hundred kilometers, or a little less than six hundred miles, depending  on where you start and whether you continue to the sea, and takes most  people about a month to walk.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book  Tom had moved to Estonia to work on was a record of his visits to the  far-flung tombs of the apostles, and by the time I was done reading up  on the Camino, which had an immediate appeal for reasons I only dimly  understood, I'd retrieved a faint memory of Tom's having said he planned  to spend the following summer strolling across Spain, starting on the  French side of the Pyrenean border. I didn't know what to make of my  \"June 10\" note, though, so I called him up on Skype. He hadn't slept  since I'd left, but he sounded chipper, happy to hear from me.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"I miss you, man,\" he said. \"I'm lonely again and wish you were still around.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Me, too, buddy.\" I paused. \"So, Tom, what's going on June 10?\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"That's the day we start,\" he said. \"It worked with both of our schedules.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI  had no schedule to speak of, so I couldn't argue with that. Then again,  neither did he. The notion of something working with our sched­ules  made me suspicious.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"The day we start what, Tom?\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Our  walk across Spain. You don't remember? Strolling through hills by  night, just you and me and the long path ahead. I told you any ho­tels  we stay in are on me. You had that whole rousing speech about how we'd  wake up each morning full of the simple, broad purpose of moving  forward. You pounded your fist on the table and shouted to the whole bar  that you were one hundred percent in. A few Estonians even clapped,  though maybe they were just trying to get you to be quiet. Then we  prom­ised some girls we'd send them postcards from Santiago.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Riverhead Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303997886693,"sku":"NP9781594631498","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781594631498.jpg?v=1767720774","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/a-sense-of-direction-isbn-9781594631498","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}