Working the Room: Essays and Reviews: 1999-2010

Description

Alive with insight, wit and Dyer's characteristic irreverence, this collection of essays 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 other 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.

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.

* 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 * A true original - one of those rare voices in contemporary literature that never ceases to surprise, disturb and delight ... Dyer is a must-read for our confused and perplexing times. William Boyd * Dyer is becoming a character just as arch and seductive as that professional self-effacer from the previous generation, Alan Bennett. Observer * Insightful, humorous, and ... exemplifies his passion, wit and ability. -- Rob Sharp Independent * An irresistibly funny storyteller, [Dyer] is adept at fiction, essay and reportage, but happiest when twisting all three into something entirely his own. New Yorker * It's this ability to develop such passions that gives the literary flaneur his curious edge, a gift for turning both acute spasms of obsession and long-rumbling preoccupations into writing, a highly strung take on the journalistic necessity of burrowing into a subject like a worm in an apple, then moving on to a new fruit -- Victoria Segal Guardian * Dyer's musings provide an intensely personal view of the world The Times * It's this ability to develop such passions that gives the literary flaneur his curious edge, a gift for turning both acute spasms of obsession and long-rumbling preoccupations into writing, a highly strung take on the journalistic necessity of burrowing into a subject like a worm in an apple, then moving on to a new fruit. Guardian * Essays and journalism, often very funny, from the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. Sunday Telegraph * Dyer's musings provide an intensely personal view of the world. Times