“Marvellous… a glorious truant from study… gives a better picture of Lawrence than any biography I know.” James Wood, Guardian
Geoff Dyer was a talentend young writer, full of energy and reverence for the craft, and determined to write a study of D H Lawrence. But he was also thinking about a novel, and about leaving Paris, and maybe moving in with his girlfriend in Rome, or perhaps travelling around for a while. Out of Sheer Rage is Dyer’s account of his struggle to write the Lawrence book – a portrait of a man tormented, exhilarated and exhausted. Dyer travels all over the world, grappling not only with his fascinating subject but with all the glorious distractions and needling anxieties that define the life of a writer.
“If there were a prize for the year’s funniest book then Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage would win hands down.” Independent on Sunday
“Funny and self-laceratingly candid but with a nice Nabokovian spin on the fatal and irresistable allure of procrastination.” William Boyd, Books of the Year, The Spectator
“In the spirit if Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot and Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expext it to… A wild book.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
“One of the most beautifully eccentric meditations on a major author… a beguiling autobiographical text of considerable acuteness and insight.” Times Literary Supplement
Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award
First published: UK, Little Brown, 1997; US, FSG, 1998
Current paperback editions: UK, Canongate; US, Picador