Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence

Description

Sitting down to write a book about his hero D. H. Lawrence, Geoff Dyer finds himself compelled to write about anything else. He is in fact compelled to do more or less anything else instead of write. In Sicily he is too preoccupied by his hatred of seafood to follow the great writer's footsteps; in Mexico he cannot get beyond a drug-induced erotic fantasy on a nudist beach . . . And yet, incredibly, this attempt to write a 'sober academic study' reveals the hold Lawrence and his work still exert on us today. Out of Sheer Rage is a complete one-off, a richly comic study of the combination of bad temper, procrastination and the uncanny power of obliquity.

Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as nine non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center 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 won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in London.

* An intriguing, magnetic, genre-rattling book The Times * Marvellous ... a glorious truant from study ... gives a better picture of (Lawrence) than any biography I know. -- James Wood Guardian * The kind of book that gives literary criticism a bad name. Hilarious! -- John Berger * A masterpiece Mail on Sunday * If there was a prize for the year's funniest book then it would win hands down Independent on Sunday * Quite possibly the best living writer in Britain Daily Telegraph * A national treasure -- Zadie Smith * 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 * Geoff Dyer is a true original - one of those rare voices in contemporary literature that never ceases to surprise, disturb and delight. Risky, breathtakingly candid, intellectual, cool, outrageous, laconic and sometimes shocking, Geoff Dyer is a must-read for our confused and perplexing times. -- William Boyd * [Out of Sheer Rage] gets the full Canongate Canons treatment from its new Edinburgh publishers this month; happy, happy news if ever there was any, O.O.S.R is vintage Dyer, and well worthy of this upgrade to 'modern classic' status. Dazed and Confused * Reading this book is the very opposite of a waste of time. It is an education and a delight Guardian