Cover of Blinding Light

Blinding Light

From the New York Times best-selling author Paul Theroux, Blinding Light is a slyly satirical novel of manners and mind expansion. Slade Steadman, a writer who has lost his chops, sets out for the Ecuadorian jungle with his ex-girlfriend in search of inspiration and a rare hallucinogen. The drug, once found, heightens both his powers of perception and his libido, but it also leaves him with an unfortunate side effect: periodic blindness. Unable to resist the insights that enable him to write again, Steadman spends the next year of his life in thrall to his psychedelic muse and his erotic fantasies, with consequences that are both ecstatic and disastrous.

Audience
adult
Length
long · 448 pages

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  1. The Amnesia Clinic Shares fiction, Ecuador, South America
  2. The Complete Peanuts, 1963-1966 Shares fiction
  3. The Panama Hat Trail: A Journey from South America Shares travel, South America, Ecuador
  4. Trail of Feathers: In Search of the Birdmen of Peru Shares travel, South America

“People who read Blinding Light tend to reach for these next.”

  1. In Tasmania: Adventures at the End of the World
  2. It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
  3. The Idiot & The Possessed
  4. The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“If you want more of the same (travel), start with these.”

  1. Living Poor
  2. The Revolutionaries Try Again
  3. The Gringo
  4. Indecision

“If it was the South America that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. At Play in the Fields of the Lord
  2. Cloud Road: A Journey through the Inca Heartland
  3. The Divine Husband
  4. My Father's Island: A Galapagos Quest

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia
  2. The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience
  3. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
  4. Destined to Feel