A book of essays reflecting Geoff Dyer’s work over the past ten years. Essays covering everything from personal reflections to perceptive critiques of writers and artists, the range spaning humour to insights into military morality. You’ll find yourself furiously scribbling notes on future reading and references to follow up as you follow the author through subjects rare and familiar – and if you haven’t read his work before, I guarantee you’ll want to read more.
Alive with insight, wit and Dyer's characteristic irreverence, this book offers a guide around the cultural maze, mapping a route through the worlds of literature, art, photography and music. Besides exploring what it is that makes great art great, Working the Room ventures into more personal territory with extensive autobiographical pieces - 'On Being an Only Child', 'Sacked' and 'Reader's Block', among others gems. Dyer's breadth of vision and generosity of spirit combine to form a manual for ways of being in - and seeing - the world today.
'Dyer is becoming a character just as arch and seductive as that professional self-effacer from the previous generation, Alan Bennett.' - Observer
'Shrewd, funny, original ... very good company on the page.' - Andrew Motion, Guardian
'A national treasure.' - Zadie Smith
'A seductively straightforward writer ... like Orwell. Dyer writes engrossingly on everything from love of doughnuts to his sequestered working class childhood in Swindon.' - Will Self, Financial Times
'One of my favourite of all contemporary writers. I love his sense of the absurd, his pessimism mixed with robust good cheer, his beautifully crafted sentences, his jokes and his intelligence.' - Alain de Botton
'Languid, elegant, brilliantly conversational.' - Tim Adams, Observer
Author
About Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as seven other non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Centre of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ's Writer of the Year. He lives in London.
