Available as Paperback
A brilliant, wide-ranging collection of essays and journalism from the prize-winning author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Alive with insight, delight and Dyer’s characteristic irreverence, this book offers a guide around the cultural maze, mapping a route through the worlds of literature, art, photography, music. Across ten years’ worth of essays, Working the Room spans the photography of Martin Parr and the paintings of Turner, the writing of Scott Fitzgerald and the criticism of Susan Sontag, and includes extensive personal pieces - ‘On Being an Only Child’, ‘Sacked’ and ‘Reader’s Block’ among many others. Dyer’s breadth of vision and generosity of spirit combine to form a manual for ways of being in - and seeing - the world today.
“Shrewd, funny, original … very good company on the page.”
Andrew Motion
guardian
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“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
Geoff Dyer
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. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.