A grinning marble bust of Bacchus—the Roman god of wine and its liberties—stands guard outside Paul Theroux's writing studio on a secluded Cape Cod hilltop. It is just one of the artifacts that this renowned and at times notorious traveler has brought back from his journeys by rail, boat, car, bus, and lorry across nearly every place on earth, from Patagonia to Polynesian Tonga. I have come to visit Theroux on a windswept morning to talk about his new book, The Elephanta Suite (Houghton Mifflin), a trio of novellas set in India. But first I have to get over the feeling, contemplating Bacchus on a shady pathway, that I've crossed the Sagamore Bridge and followed Route 6 all the way to Capri.

"Reading has to be a joyful experience," Theroux tells me over an expertly made espresso on the back deck of his sunny, lived–in house in East Sandwich, both a seasonal hideaway (Theroux spends his summers in his native Massachusetts and his winters on Oahu) and a storehouse for his well–traveled objects, which communicate an epicurean approach to life: Wood–carved Chokwe masks from Angola mingle with Coptic Christian devotional paintings from Ethiopia and a self–portrait in triptych by the painter Francis Bacon. "Writing should be joyful, too," he insists, in view of a swimming pool, a boccie court, and a gazebo shipped over from London. "If a reader can't pick up a book and enjoy it in a deep sense, there isn't much point."

Trim, tanned, and fidgeting with energy at 66, Theroux jokes about having reached retirement age but shows no signs of slowing down, either in person or in print. He wrote The Elephanta Suite—which depicts American tourists adrift in a modern India of outsourcing and ashrams—during an epic 2006 journey by train from London through Central Asia to Japan and all the way back again. He took the same journey in 1973 for his best–selling The Great Railway Bazaar and decided, 33 years later, to retrace his steps. (A travel book inspired by his return journey will be out next year.)

"In out–of–the–way places I don't go out at night," Theroux tells me as he fiddles with the bowline of a miniature wooden dory. "I don't go prowling the streets in Burma or rural India. It's not a good idea. Usually there's nothing there—just trouble." If only the characters in The Elephanta Suite had followed their creator's example of how to conduct oneself on foreign soil. Audie and Beth Blunden, the couple having a Magic Mountain experience at an ayurvedic spa in "Monkey Hill," meet a chilling fate in a nearby town roiled by Hindu?Muslim violence after being tempted there by young flesh. (As for his own erotic adventures, recounted in such books as My Secret History and Sir Vidia's Shadow, Theroux remarks with a touch of irony, "Obviously I'm too old for that now.") In "The Gateway of India," Dwight Huntsinger ("Mr. Hund" to his Indian partners) comes to Mumbai to turn big profits for an American firm and finds debauchery in the back–alley slums—and redemption through the wisdom of a Jain colleague who ends up making off with his laptop. "The Elephant God" sees Alice Durand, a plain 20–something fresh from Brown, enacting revenge—with the help of a lust–mad elephant—on the persistent customer–service trainee who helped her find a job teaching English in Bangalore, only to turn around and assault her. "I wanted to write about the India that doesn't make it into stories," Theroux tells me as the morning stretches on. "It's not the old India of E. M. Forster."