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Book Title

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

Subtitle
Selected Essays and Reviews
Author 1
Geoff Dyer
Body
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.

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List Price
$18.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-579-1
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Pages
Pages
432
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 x 9
Keynote
“An irresistibly funny storyteller, [Dyer] is adept at fiction, essay, and reportage, but happiest when twisting all three into something entirely his own.”—The New Yorker

About the Author

Geoff  Dyer
Credit: Curt Richter

Geoff Dyer is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of Southern California.

http://geoffdyer.com/

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Praise

  • “Mr. Dyer’s new book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, is a collection of his occasional prose. . . . They’re ‘bits and bobs,’ he writes, but he takes them more seriously than that, and so should anyone who cares about joyous, wriggling sentences composed in the English language.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
  • “There’s a restless current to these essays, as if a net were being thrown ever wider in search of fresh versions of that original burst of aesthetic delight, literature, which managed to turn a working-class grammar school boy from Cheltenham into an international ‘man of letters.’ . . . This is what I find most remarkable about Dyer: his tone. Its simplicity, its classlessness, its accessibility and yet its erudition—the combination is a trick few British writers ever pull off. . . . [Dyer’s humor is] what separates him from Berger and Lawrence and Sontag: it’s what makes these essays not just an education, but a joy.”—Zadie Smith, Harper’s Magazine
  • “You read Dyer for his caustic wit, of course, his exquisite and perceptive crankiness, and his deep and exciting intellectual connections, but from these enthralling rants and cultural investigations there finally emerges another Dyer, a generous seeker of human feeling and experience, a man perhaps closer than he thinks to what he believes his hero Camus achieved: ‘a heart free of bitterness.’”—Sam Lipsyte, Very Short List
  • “Dyer’s writing does what the best critical writing always does, encouraging us to view, read, or listen closely to art, literature, and music as well as to pay close attention to various cultural forms and their impact on our personal lives.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
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