Bøger af Geoff Dyer

Could it be that our deepest desire is for it all to be over? A book about the end of days from the award-winning author of Out of Sheer Rage and Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

A full-colour illuminated history of how photographs frame and change the world, from the award-winning author of The Ongoing Moment

Ever wondered where your deepest desires might lead?

A deeply personal meditation on remembrance, art, and World War I by the legendary Geoff Dyer, reissued with a new introduction by Drew Gilpin FaustThe Missing of the Somme is part travelogue, part meditation on remembrance-and completely, unabashedly unlike any other book about the First World War. Through visits to battlefields and memorials, Geoff Dyer examines the way that photographs and film, poetry and prose, determined-sometimes in advance of the events described-the way we would think about and remember the war. With his characteristic originality and insight, Dyer untangles and reconstructs the network of myth and memory that illuminates our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War. Reissued with a new introduction, The Missing of the Somme stands as one of Dyer's classic works.

One of Esquire's best books of spring 2022An extended meditation on late style and last works from "one of our greatest living critics" (Kathryn Schulz, New York).How and when do artists and athletes know that their careers are coming to an end? What if the end comes early in a writer's life? How to keep going even as the ability to do so diminishes? In this ingeniously structured investigation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, musicians, and sports stars who've mattered to him throughout his life. With playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he considers Friedrich Nietzsche's breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan's reinventions of old songs, J.M.W. Turner's proto-abstract paintings of blazing light, Jean Rhys's late-life resurgence, and John Coltrane's final works.Ranging from Burning Man to Beethoven, from Eve Babitz to William Basinski, and from Annie Dillard to Giorgio de Chirico, Dyer's study of last things is also a book about how to go on living with art and beauty-and the sudden rejuvenation offered by books, films, and music discovered late in life. Praised by Kathryn Schulz as "one of our greatest living critics, not of the arts but of life itself," and by Tom Bissell as "perhaps the most bafflingly great writer at work in the English language today," Dyer has now blended criticism, memoir, and badinage 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.

One of Esquire's best books of spring 2022An 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.

People talk about love at first sight, about the way that men and women fall for each other immediately, but there is also such a thing as friendship at first sight.Luke moves to Paris with the idea of writing a novel but things get in the way. He becomes friends with a fellow expatriate, Alex; then he falls in love with Nicole. Alex meets Sahra, and the two couples form an intimacy that changes their lives. As they discover the clubs and cafés of the eleventh arrondissement, the four become inseparable, united by deeply held convictions about dating strategies, tunneling in P.O.W. films, and, crucially, the role of the Styrofoam cup in action movies. Experiencing the exhilarating highs of Ecstasy and sex, they reach a peak of rapture-the comedown from which is unexpected and devastating.In this book, Geoff Dyer fixes a dream of happiness-and its aftermath-with photographic precision. Boldly erotic and hauntingly elegiac, comic and romantic, Paris Trance confirms Dyer as one of England's most original and talented writers.

"May be the best book ever written about jazz."-David Thomson, Los Angeles TimesIn eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skillfully evokes the music and the men who shaped modern jazz. Drawing on photos, anecdotes, and, most important, the way he hears the music, Dyer imaginatively reconstructs scenes from the embattled lives of some of the greats: Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonious Monk creating his own private language on the piano. However, music is the driving force of But Beautiful, and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician's style.

*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism**A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice**A New York Times Top 10 Nonfiction Book of the Year, as selected by Dwight Garner*Geoff Dyer has earned the devotion of passionate fans on both sides of the Atlantic through his wildly inventive, romantic novels as well as several brilliant, uncategorizable works of nonfiction. All the while he has been writing some of the wittiest, most incisive criticism we have on an astonishing array of subjects-music, literature, photography, and travel journalism-that, in Dyer's expert hands, becomes a kind of irresistible self-reportage. Otherwise Known as the Human Condition collects twenty-five years of essays, reviews, and misadventures. Here he 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 status of jazz and the wonderous Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, on the sculptor ZadKine and the saxophonist David Murray (in the same essay), on his heroes Rebecca West and Ryszard Kapus¿cin¿ski, on haute couture and sex in hotels. Whatever he writes about, his responses never fail to surprise. For Dyer there is no division between the reflective work of the critic and the novelist's commitment to lived experience: they are mutually illuminating ways to sharpen our perceptions. His is the rare body of work that manages to both frame our world and enlarge it.

Republished to mark the centenary of the battle of the Somme Geoff Dyer's classic book is 'the great Great War book of our time' (Observer)

Offers a trilogy of tautly rendered examinations of the spectacle of war, memory, and landscape. This book presents an exploration of the American military, a pursuit both personal and civic.

'Among the most original and talented writers of his generation' Independent on Sunday

'If Raymond Chandler and Italo Calvino had collaborated on a road movie script the result might have been somewhat similar' Sunday Telegraph

By sea and on the airwaves, by dollar and yuan, a contest has begun that will shape the next century. China's rise has now entered a critical new phase, as it seeks to translate its considerable economic heft into a larger role on the world stage, challenging American supremacy. Yet he also shows why China may struggle to unseat the West - its ambitious designs are provoking anxiety, especially in Asia, while America's global alliances have deep roots. If Washington can adjust to a world in which it is not the sole dominant power, it may be able to retain its ability to set the global agenda.

'Not since Colin MacInnes's City of Spades and Absolute Beginners thirty years ago has a novel stuck a flick-knife so accurately into the young and marginal city' The Times

'A screamingly funny genre-defying feat . . . sublime' Maggie O'Farrell, Daily Telegraph

'A beautifully composed rave generation rhapsody . . . dripping with eroticism.' Sunday Times