Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer’s Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard an American aircraft carrier, comes out in May.

Diary: Why Can’t I See You?

Geoff Dyer, 3 April 2014

‘Something’s happened to my eye,’ I called out to my wife. She was in the bedroom but she too had semi-disappeared. I could see half of her body but her face had gone. I thumped myself lightly on the side of the head as if that might knock everything back into place, dislodge the opaque filter that had come between me – though even the idea of there being a me had become less certain than usual – and the world. I was getting confused as I tried to make sense of this insubstantial world in which things were and were not.

In Transit: Garry Winogrand

Geoff Dyer, 20 June 2013

I didn’t make it to the huge Garry Winogrand retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco but if the very large catalogue is anything to go by the show was obviously … not nearly big enough!* How could it have been? Winogrand is inexhaustible. There’s probably more to look at in a Winogrand photo than in one by anyone else (part of the attraction of a...

Realty Meltdown

Geoff Dyer, 24 August 1995

Richard Ford’s narrator, Frank Bascombe, quit serious writing to become a sports-writer. This was the making of Ford. It wasn’t until he became Bascombe, the sportswriter, that Ford turned himself into a major novelist.

If we leave aside some notes and references at the back, Zona seems to close, appropriately, with a description of the end of a film: ‘her eyes, her watching eyes, and her face and head,...

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How Dare He? Geoff Dyer

Jenny Turner, 11 June 2009

‘I had envied them sometimes,’ Geoff Dyer writes in Out of Sheer Rage, his 1997 book about D.H. Lawrence. ‘Those in work, those with jobs. Especially on a Friday night when,...

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No Longer Handsome: Geoff Dyer

William Skidelsky, 25 September 2003

Geoff Dyer announced recently that he wasn’t ‘very interested in character and not remotely interested in story or plot’. For someone who writes novels (I hesitate to use the...

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Hare’s Blood: John Berger

Peter Wollen, 4 April 2002

John Berger’s selected essays run to nearly six hundred pages, yet that is just the tip of the iceberg if one looks at the totality of his published work: the essays and reviews about the...

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In Service

Anthony Thwaite, 18 May 1989

There’s an Auden sonnet, written in 1938 as part of the ‘In Time of War’ sequence, in which the setting seems to be a country house where great matters are being discussed: ...

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Agreeing with Berger

Peter Campbell, 19 March 1987

John Berger is 60. He is not forgotten. Permanent Red, his criticism from the Fifties, is in print. Ways of Seeing is the antidote put in the hands of students who have drunk too deeply of...

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