He had lived in China for 11 years, completing a trilogy that also includes Oracle Bones and Country Driving. Hessler then moved to Beijing, where he became the China correspondent for The New Yorker and a contributing writer to National Geographic in 2000. Together they comprise Hessler’s “China trilogy,” covering the decade in which he lived in the country, from 1996 until 2007. This book was followed by two others about China: Oracle Bones and Country Driving. He wrote about it in his first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. For two years, he had lived in Fuling, a small city affected by the Three Gorges Dam. In 1996, Peter Hessler joined the Peace Corps as a volunteer English teacher. He wrote an extensive ethnography about a small town called Sikeston, which was published in the Journal for Applied Anthropology. The summer before graduating from Princeton, Hessler worked as a researcher for the Kellogg Foundation in southeastern Missouri.

One of his last books is entitled The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution. In 2011, Hessler moved to Cairo, where for five years he had covered the events of the Egyptian Arab Spring. In 2007 he settled in Ridgway, Colorado and has continued to publish articles in The New Yorker on topics including the Peace Corps in Nepal and small towns in Colorado.

Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler