Geoff Dyer

A fictional recreation of the spirit and sound of jazz traces the history of the music through the lives of eight great musicians: Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Chet Baker, Bud Powell, and Art Pepper

A Book about Jazz

But Beautiful

Chronicles the author's attempt to write a biography about the writer D.H. Lawrence.

Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

Out of Sheer Rage

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Anthony and Gloria are the essence of Jazz Age glamour. A brilliant and magnetic couple, they fling themselves at life with an energy that is thrilling. Their marriage is a passionate theatrical performance; they are young, rich, alive and lovely and they intend to inherit the earth. But as money becomes tight, their marriage becomes impossible.

The Beautiful and Damned

A volume of definitive nonfiction writings by the National Book Critics Circle finalist author of Out of Sheer Rage draws on 25 years of work and includes pieces that reflect on subjects ranging from jazz and the British-dole queue to haute couture and hotel sex. Original. 12,000 first printing.

Selected Essays and Reviews

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

An extended meditation on late style and last works from "one of our greatest living critics" (Kathryn Schulz, New York). When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating torment? As our bodies decay, how do we keep on? In this beguiling meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who’ve mattered to him throughout his life. With a playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he recounts Friedrich Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan’s reinventions of old songs, J. M. W. Turner’s paintings of abstracted light, John Coltrane’s cosmic melodies, Bjorn Borg’s defeats, and Beethoven’s final quartets—and considers the intensifications and modifications of experience that come when an ending is within sight. Throughout, he stresses the accomplishments of uncouth geniuses who defied convention, and went on doing so even when their beautiful youths were over. Ranging from Burning Man and the Doors to the nineteenth-century Alps and back, Dyer’s book on last things is also a book about how to go on living with art and beauty—and on the entrancing effect and sudden illumination that an Art Pepper solo or Annie Dillard reflection can engender in even the most jaded and ironic sensibilities. Praised by Steve Martin for his “hilarious tics” and by Tom Bissell as “perhaps the most bafflingly great prose writer at work in the English language today,” Dyer has now blended criticism, memoir, and humorous banter of the most serious kind into something entirely new. The Last Days of Roger Federer is a summation of Dyer’s passions, and the perfect introduction to his sly and joyous work.

And Other Endings

The Last Days of Roger Federer

An analysis of the film "Stalker" describes the author's thirty-year fascination with the film and evaluates how it reflects both European cinema and the deepest desires of the human psyche.

A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room

Zona

From "one of our most original writers" (Kathryn Schulz) comes an expansive and exacting book--firmly grounded, but elegant, witty, and always inquisitive--about travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves. Geoff Dyer's perennial search for tranquility, for "something better," continues in this series of fascinating and seemingly unrelated pilgrimages--with a tour guide who is in fact not a tour guide at the Forbidden City in Beijing, with friends at the Lightning Field in New Mexico, with a hitchhiker picked up near a prison at White Sands, and with "a dream of how things should have been" at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles. Weaving stories about places to which he has recently traveled with images and memories that have persisted since childhood, Dyer tries "to work out what a certain place--a certain way of marking the landscape--means; what it's trying to tell us; what we go to it for." One of the essays takes its title from Gaugin's masterwork, and asks the same questions: Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going? The answers are elusive: in French Polynesia, where he travels to write about Gaugin and the lure of the exotic, when he visits the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see the masterpiece in person only to be told it is travelling, when he and his wife journey to Norway to see, but end up not seeing, the Northern Lights. But at home in California, after a medical event that makes Dyer see everything in a different way, he may finally have found what he's been searching for.

Experiences from the Outside World

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

The author of The Color of Memory journeys around the world--from New Orleans to Cambodia, Amsterdam, Thailand, Paris, Rome, and Nevada--reflecting on the disparity among anticipation, expectation, and reality and examining the ways in which experience is shaped by place and how it in turn affects how we feel about ourselves. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

Leanne Shapton

Lila Azam Zanganeh

A collection of maps that will leave readers feeling completely lost.Every day we map. We map how we get from a to b. We map when we're somewhere new, and somewhere we've been many times before. We map ourselves, our days, our thoughts, memories, what we want to mark, save and share. Today it seems, that most of the time, despite all this mapping, we actually don't have a clear sense of where we are. Where&nbspYou Are, a collection of new work, explores the shift from our classic understanding of map as geography to a more personal, human map. This collection of new writings, photographs, drawings, thinking looks to explode the map as we know it. A book of maps that puts people, not destinations at the centre, hoping to leave readers feeling completely lost.A collection of work, edited by Visual Editions, made with help by our friends at Google Creative Lab, published as a book and on the screen.

A Book of Maps that Will Leave You Feeling Completely Lost

Where You are

Jeff Atman is a British journalist on assignment in Venice who feels disillusioned with his hedonistic way of living, while a narrator in the Indian holy city of Varanasi practices detachment and meditates on art and spiritual matters.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

An idiosyncratic study of the fine art of photography analyzes the signature styles of Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston, describing how each photographer depicted subjects, what the images reveal about the underlying idea, and the power and impact of photography on viewers. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

The Ongoing Moment

'Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun, looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him. A photograph from the war, is also a photograph of the way the war will be remembered. It is a photograph of the future, of the future's view of the past. We will remember them.'Relying more on personal impressions than systematic analysis, Geoff Dyer weaves a network of myth and memory that illuminates our own relation to the past.

The Missing of the Somme

Jean Baudrillard

In the spirit of Tocqueville, a French philosopher traveled America and recorded a collection of travelers tales that provides insight into the country that dominates the world, in a new edition with an additional introduction. Reprint.

America

Alex Webb

Gathering some of Alex Webbs 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. Webbs ability to distil gesture, colour and contrasting cultural tensions into single, beguiling frames results in evocative images that convey a sense of enigma, irony and humour. Featuring key works alongside previously unpublished photographs, This is Webbs first comprehensive monograph and provides the most thorough examination to date of this modern masters prolific, thirty-year career.

Thirty Years of Photographs by Alex Webb

The Suffering of Light

The first novel, in revised form, from "possibly the best living writer in Britain" (The Daily Telegraph) In The Colour of Memory, six friends plot a nomadic course through their mid-twenties as they scratch out an existence in near-destitute conditions in 1980s South London. They while away their hours drinking cheap beer, landing jobs and quickly squandering them, smoking weed, dodging muggings, listening to Coltrane, finding and losing a facsimile of love, collecting unemployment, and discussing politics in the way of the besotted young--as if they were employed only by the lives they chose. In his vivid evocation of council flats and pubs, of a life lived in the teeth of romantic ideals, Geoff Dyer provides a shockingly relevant snapshot of a different Lost Generation.

A Novel

The Colour of Memory

China Miéville

Susan Abulhawa

Henning Mankell

Chinua Achebe

Michael Ondaatje

Linda Spalding

Adam Foulds

Pankaj Mishra

Claire Messud

Kamila Shamsie

Teju Cole

Deborah Moggach

Michael Palin

J.M. Coetzee

Raja Shehadeh

Rachel Holmes

Sabrina Mahfouz

William Sutcliffe

Mohammed Hanif

Molly Crabapple

Alice Walker

Mahmoud Darwish

Ed Pavlic

Gillian Slovo

Ru Freeman

Najwan Darwish

Jeremy Harding

Yasmin El-Rifae

Suheir Hammad

Mercedes Kemp

John Horner

Suad Amiry

Bridget Keenan

Jehan Bseiso

Atef Abu Saif

Omar El-Khairy

Selma Dabbagh

Remi Kanazi

Muiz,

Ghada Karmi

Maath Musleh

Nancy Kricorian

Nathalie Handal

Victoria Brittain

Jamal Mahjoub

Writers from Alice Walker to Michael Ondaatje to Claire Messud share their thoughts on one of the most vital gatherings of writers and readers in the world. The Palestine Festival of Literature was established in 2008 by authors Ahdaf Soueif, Brigid Keenan, Victoria Brittain and Omar Robert Hamilton. Bringing writers to Palestine from all corners of the globe, it aimed to break the cultural siege imposed by the Israeli military occupation, to strengthen artistic links with the rest of the world, and to reaffirm, in the words of Edward Said, "the power of culture over the culture of power." Celebrating the tenth anniversary of PalFest, This Is Not a Border is a collection of essays, poems, and sketches from some of the world's most distinguished artists, responding to their experiences at this unique festival. Both heartbreaking and hopeful, their gathered work is a testament to the power of literature to promote solidarity and hope in the most desperate of situations. Contributing authors include J. M. Coetzee, China Miéville, Alice Walker, Geoff Dyer, Claire Messud, Henning Mankell, Michael Ondaatje, Kamila Shamsie, Michael Palin, Deborah Moggach, Mohammed Hanif, Gillian Slovo, Adam Foulds, Susan Abulhawa, Ahdaf Soueif, Jeremy Harding, Brigid Keenan, Rachel Holmes, Suad Amiry, Gary Younge, Jamal Mahjoub, Molly Crabapple, Najwan Darwish, Nathalie Handal, Omar Robert Hamilton, Pankaj Mishra, Raja Shehadeh, Selma Dabbagh, William Sutcliffe, Atef Abu Saif, Yasmin El-Rifae, Sabrina Mahfouz, Alaa Abd El Fattah, Mercedes Kemp, Ru Freeman.

Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

This Is Not A Border

Luke moves to Paris and, with his new love and the other expatriate couple from whom they become inseparable, wanders the Eleventh Arrondissement where clubs, cafés, banter, and ecstasy now occupy Gertrude Stein's city "which is not real but is really there." In Paris Trance, Geoff Dyer fixes a dream of happiness--and its aftermath--with photographic precision. Boldly erotic and hauntingly elegiac, comic and romantic, this brilliant reconception of the classic expatriate novels of the Lost Generation confirms Dyer as one of our most original and talented writers.

A Romance

Paris Trance

A Book About Jazz

Part travelogue, part social observation, the author, who was the oldest, second tallest and most self-conscious person on the boat, presents an entertaining look at life on board an American aircraft carrier and the military personal who must adhere to a regimen defined by service and restraint.

"As a child Geoff Dyer spent long hours making and blotchily painting model fighter planes. So the adult Dyer jumped at the chance of a residency aboard an aircraft carrier. Another Great Day at Sea chronicles Dyer's experiences on the USS George H.W. Bush as he navigates the routines and protocols of "carrier-world," from the elaborate choreography of the flight deck through miles of walkways and hatches to kitchens serving meals for a crew of five thousand to the deafening complexity of catapult and arresting gear. Meeting the Captain, the F-18 pilots and the dentists, experiencing everything from a man-overboard alert to the Steel Beach Party, Dyer guides us through the most AIE (acronym intensive environment) imaginable. A lanky Englishman (could he really be both the tallest and the oldest person on the ship?) in a deeply American world, with its constant exhortations to improve, to do better, Dyer brilliantly records the daily life on board the ship, revealing it to be a prism for understanding a society where discipline and conformity, dedication and optimism, become forms of self-expression."--

life aboard the USS George H.W. Bush

Another great day at sea

From “one of our most original writers” (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine) comes an expansive and exacting book—firmly grounded but elegant, often hilarious, and always inquisitive—about travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves. Geoff Dyer’s restless search—for what? is unclear, even to him—continues in this series of fascinating adventures and pilgrimages: with a tour guide who may not be a tour guide in the Forbidden City in Beijing; with friends in New Mexico, where D. H. Lawrence famously claimed to have had his “greatest experience from the outside world”; with a hitchhiker picked up on the way from White Sands; with Don Cherry (or a photo of him, at any rate) at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles. Weaving stories about places to which he has recently traveled with images and memories that have persisted since childhood, Dyer tries “to work out what a certain place—a certain way of marking the landscape—means; what it’s trying to tell us; what we go to it for.” With 4 pages of full-color illustrations.

White Sands

Geoff Dyer

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