Geoff Dyer

Zona

geoffadmin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 02:49:10 +0000

“The most stimulating book on a film in years.” David Thomson (author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film), The New Republic

In Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room Geoff Dyer delves into the mysteries of a film that has haunted him ever since he saw it thirty years ago: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which is widely regarded as one of the greatest cinematic works of all time. (“Every single frame,” declared Cate Blanchett, “is burned into my retina.”)

As Dyer moves into the zone of Tarkovksy’s imagination, the film becomes an entry point for a radically original investigation of how art shapes the way we see the world – and how we make our way through it.

Zona takes the reader on an enthralling and thought-provoking journey. Like Stalker itself, it confronts the most mysterious and enduring questions of life and how to live. It fascinates from start to finish – even if you haven’t seen the film.

‘Few books about film feel like watching a film, but this one does. We sit with Dyer as he writes about Stalker, he captures its mystery and burnish, he prises it open and gets its glum majesty. As a result of this book, I know the film better, and care about Tarkovsky even more.’ Mark Cousins, author of The Story of Film

‘I loved this book. How can it possibly work – a book describing a film, more or less shot by shot? But it triumphantly does – i actually felt suspense, and revelation. And i’d never laugh at Stalker, but i did laugh all the way through this.’ Tessa Hadley, author of London Train

‘There is no contemporary writer I admire more than Dyer.’ David Shields, author of Reality Hunger

‘Magnificently unpredictable, frequently hilarious and, surely, one of the most unusual books ever written about cinema.’ GQ Magazine

First published by Canongate, UK, 2012; Pantheon, US, 2012.
Current paperback edition: US, Vintage.

(Information about translations will be added soon)

REVIEWS
The New York Observer
LA Times
The Telegraph
New York Times
The Financial Times
The Observer
The Guardian
The Independent on Sunday
The Independent
The Scotsman
The Irish Times
The Sydney Morning Herald
The New Republic
Frieze
Kirkus
The Melbourne Review
The Millions
The List
The White Review
The New Zealand Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald
Globe and Mail
NPR Books
Slate.com
The Quarterly Conversation
The Daily Beast

INTERVIEWS
Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times
Florence Welch in The Telegraph
Guernica
Bookforum
GQ
The Daily Beast
The Believer

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

geoffadmin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 07:43:05 +0000

Geoff Dyer has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition announced in New York on 8 March 2012. The NBCC judges said that Dyer is a “critic par excellence who showed his love of his various subject in tour-de-force language.”

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition collects twenty-five years of essays, reviews, and misadventures. Here Geoff Dyer is pursuing the shadow of Camus in Algeria and remembering life on the dole in Brixton in the 1980s; reflecting on Richard Avedon and Ruth Orkin, on the sculptor Zadkine and the saxophonist David Murray (in the same essay), on his heroes Rebecca West and Ryszard Kapuscinski, on haute couture and sex in hotels.

“Dyer’s writing does what the best critical writing always does, encouraging us to view, read, or listen closely to art, literature, and music as well as to pay close attention to various cultural forms and their impact on our personal lives.” Publishers’ Weekly, Starred Review

First published: US, Graywolf, 2011

You can buy this book by clicking on the following:

PRESS

New York Times
Los Angeles Times
New York Times Book Review
New York Observer
San Francisco Chronicle
The Millions
Washington Post
Boston Globe
The Orgeonian
Bookslut
Kirkus Reviews
The Daily Beast
Very Short List
Financial Times
New York Journal of Books
Threepenny Review
Barnes & Noble Reviews
Minneapolis Star Tribune
The Statesman

Paris Trance

geoffadmin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 06:32:37 +0000

“Sexy, hopelessly romantic, and almost sneakily meditative, Dyer’s novel invokes the shades of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but as they might be imagined by Truffaut.” The New Yorker

Paris Trance is the story of two expatriates, Luke and Alex, who meet in Paris and become inseparable. Each falls in love, and the two couples travel the city together in a fever of indulgence and self-discovery.

“Entrancing… I can’t think of a recent novel that better describes the scarily charged beginning of a love affair.” The New York Times Book Review

“Four things that get under your skin: shards of glass, splinters of wood, sharp needles, and books by Geoff Dyer. Where most writers barely nick the flesh of human feeling, Dyer somehow manages to dig deeper… Unusually for a contemporary English novelist Dyer is as interested in asking big, difficult questions about the meaning of life as he is in developing motifs, displaying his learning, making points, making you laugh, shocking, soothing, or being cool, all of which he manages to do with unnatural ease.” Guardian

“Witty, erotic and melancholy, a beautifully written tale.” The Times

“Charming books tend to wither as fashion moves on or as we grow older. The Catcher in the Rye, and maybe Ginger and Pickles, seem to be exceptions. Then there are books, such as The Great Gatsby, whose callowness itself profound, whose charm is persistingly, enduringly transient. Geoff Dyer has written such a book… a book about being thoughtless, young and in love… The irresistible quality of the book steals up, like sun through a plain curtain.” Candia McWilliam, New Statesman

First published: UK, Abacus 1998; UK, FSG, 1999

Current paperback editions: UK, Canongate; US, Picador

You can buy this book by clicking on the following:

Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It

geoffadmin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 02:37:30 +0000

“If Hunter S Thompson, Roland Barthes, Paul Theroux and Sylvia Plath all went on holiday together in the same body, perhaps they could come up with something like [this]. This is the funniest book I have read for a very long time… My book of the year.” William Sutcliffe, Independent on Sunday

From Amsterdam to Cambodia, from Rome to Indonesia, from New Orleans to Libya, from Detroit to Ko Pha-Ngan, Geoff Dyer finds himself both floundering about in a sea of grievances and losing himself in moments of transcendental calm. This aberrant quest for peak experiences leads, ultimately, to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada – where – to quote Tarkovsky’s Stalker – ‘your most cherished desire will come true.’

“A restless polymath and an irresistibly funny storyteller, he is adept at fiction, essay and reportage, but happiest when twisting all three into something entirely his own.” The New Yorker

“Delightfully original… Dyer’s writing brims with off-beat insights that had me chuckling hours later, or reading aloud to dinner companions…Whether or not they happened as Dyer describes, his meanderings – and his head – make for a wonderfully rich country to wander around.” Tony Horwitz, New York Times Book Review

“Another screamingly funny, genre-defying feat.” Maggie O’Farrell, Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph

“Uproarious, unclassifiable… He is assuredly among the funniest writers alive… a bohemian travel narrative as internal as any by Kerouac, told in language as aphoristic as Oscar Wilde’s.” David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle

“Geoff Dyer manipulates time, tweaking it and stretching it, like Dali’s clocks… As in dreams, certain objects—a pair of sandals, a can of Coca-Cola—reappear in different locations… The book becomes a beautiful spiral of time.” TLS

“Yoga is observant, funny and in unexpected ways affecting… a genuinely funny writer whom one reads for the sheer pleasure and surprise of it, no matter what happens to be his subject.” Washington Post

“If Jack Kerouac had lived in the era of routine jet travel, he might have written something like Yoga.” Time Out New York

Winner of W.H. Smith Best Travel Book, 2004

Current paperback editions: UK, Canongate; US, Vintage

First published: UK, Abacus, 2003, US, Pantheon 2003

You can buy this book by clicking on the following:

PRESS

The New York Times
The Telegraph
The Observer
Guardian
Sydney Morning Herald

The Missing of the Somme

rebecca — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 20:21:14 +0000

The Missing of the Somme is a personal meditation on war and remembrance. With his characteristic wit and insight, Dyer weaves a network of myth and memory, photos and film, poetry and sculptures, graveyards, and ceremonies that illuminate our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War.

“A gentle, patient, loving book. It is about mourning and memory, about how the Great War has been represented—and our sense of it shaped and defined—by different artistic media… Its textures are the very rhythms of memory and consciousness.” Guardian

“[A] penetrating meditation upon war and remembrance.” Daily Telegraph

“No contemporary writer blends genres like Geoff Dyer.” Time

First published: UK, Hamish Hamilton, 1994; US, Vintage, August 2011

Current UK edition: Canongate

You can buy this book by clicking on the following:

Jacob Holdt’s America: Faith, Hope and Love

rebecca — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:16:23 +0000

Danish photographer Jacob Holdt is internationally revered for his vision of America, as portrayed in classic volumes like American Pictures and United States 1970-1975. It is a vision which has inspired many, both in its extremity (the director Lars von Trier is reputedly a fan) and in its tenacity. Holdt arrived in the US in the early 70s with almost no money, and hitchhiked all over the US, earning a living by selling blood, and proceeded to build an amazing portrait of the margins of America over the course of his 100,000-mile journey.

This monograph, with an introduction by Geoff Dyer, continues Holdt’s fascination with American society, with a portfolio of photographs from the 70s to the present. Holdt’s photographs document the social realities of the people he travels with, spanning the demographic from poor families to millionaires, junkies and even members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Published: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2010

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Alex Webb: The Suffering of Light

geoffadmin — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 02:03:00 +0000

Gathering some of Alex Webb’s most iconic images, many of which were taken in the far corners of the earth, The Suffering of Light brings a fresh perspective to his extensive catalogue. Recognized as a pioneer of American colour photography, Webb has since the 1970s consistently created photographs characterized by intense colour and light. His work, with its richly layered and complex composition, touches on multiple genres, including street photography, photojournalism and fine art, but as Webb claims, “to me it all is photography. You have to go out and explore the world with a camera”.

The Suffering of Light, with an introduction by Geoff Dyer, is Webb’s first comprehensive monograph and provides the most thorough examination to date of this modern masters prolific, thirty-year career.

Published: UK, Thames & Hudson, May 2011; US, Aperture, May 2011)

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Alec Soth: From Here to There

geoffadmin — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 02:01:30 +0000

From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America is the first exhibition catalogue to feature the full spectrum of the work of Alec Soth, one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography. Featuring more than 100 of the artist’s photographs made over the past 15 years, the book includes new critical essays by exhibition curator Siri Engberg, curator and art historian Britt Salvesen and critic Barry Schwabsky, which offer context on the artist’s working process, the photo-historical tradition behind his practice and reflections on his latest series of works.

Geoff Dyer’s “Riverrun”- a meditation on Soth’s series Sleeping by the Mississippi – and August Kleinzahler’s poem “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City” contribute to the thoughtful exploration of this body of work.

Also included in the publication is a 48-page artist’s book by Soth titled The Loneliest Man in Missouri, a photographic essay with short, diaristic texts capturing the banality and ennui of middle America’s suburban fringes, with their corporate office parks, strip clubs and chain restaurants.

Published: US, Walker Arts Center, 2010

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Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004

geoffadmin — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 01:59:49 +0000

In August 2007, Denmark’s renowned Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presented ‘Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004′, the first major retrospective devoted to Avedon’s work since his death in 2004. To accompany the exhibition this beautifully produced catalogue was published. Designed by the renowned Danish graphic designer Michael Jensen, and featuring deluxe tritone printing and varnish on premium paper, the book includes 125 reproductions of Avedon’s greatest work from across the entire range of his oeuvre – including fashion photographs, reportage and portraits. It also contains texts by Jeffrey Fraenkel, Judith Thurman, Geoff Dyer, Christoph Ribbat, Rune Gade and curator Helle Crenzien.

Published: Denmark, Louisiana Museum, 2007

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Martin Parr: Small World

geoffadmin — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 01:58:13 +0000

Small World is a biting, very funny satire in which photographer Martin Parr looks at tourism worldwide, exposing the increasingly homogenous ‘global culture’ where in the search for different cultures those same cultures are destroyed. Parr’s larger-than-life troupe of tourists are ultimately bemused victims of consumerism, locked into our insatiable craving for ‘the new’. This new edition of Small World features an introduction by Geoff Dyer.

Published: UK and US, Dewi Lewis, 2007 revised edition

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