The Colour of Memory

The Colour of Memory

Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer

'In the race to be first in describing the lost generation of the 1980s, Geoff Dyer in The Colour of Memory leads past the winning post. 'We're not lost,' one of his hero's friend's says, 'we're virtually extinct'. It is a small world in Brixton that Dyer commemorates, of council flat and instant wasteland, of living on the dole and the scrounge, of mugging, which is merely begging by force, and of listening to Callas and Coltrane. It is the nostalgia of the DHSS Bohemians, the children of unsocial security, in an urban landscape of debris and wreckage. Not since Colin MacInnes's City of Spades and Absolute Beginners thirty years ago has a novel stuck a flick-knife so accurately into the young and marginal city. A low-keyed style and laconic wit touch up The Colour of Memory.' The TimesReviewOf all the hyped novels about 1980s London, it remains one of the most genuine - New Statesman About the AuthorGeoff 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. He lives in London.
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Another Great Day at Sea

Another Great Day at Sea

Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer

'We were on one of the technologically most advanced places on earth but the guys in grease-smeared brown sweat shirts and floatcoats, draped with heavy brown chains, looked like they were ready to face the burning oil poured on them from the walls of an impregnable castle. The combination of medieval (chains) and sci-fi (cranials and dark visors) didn't quite cover it though; there was also an element of the biker gang about them. All things considered, theirs was one of the toughest, roughest looks going. No wonder they stood there, lounging with the grace of heavy gun-slingers about to sway into the saloon. Every gesture was determined by having to move in this under-water weight of chain. I couldn't keep my eyes off them. They weren't posing. But in this silent world everyone is looking at everyone else the whole time, all communication is visual, so you're conscious, if you're a guy with a load of chains hanging from your shoulders like an ammo belt, that you're the fulfilment of some kind of fantasy-not a sexual one, more like a fantasy of evolution itself. And they weren't swaggering, there was just the ease that comes from having to minimise effort if a task is to be properly done, especially if a good part of that task involves standing around waiting with all that weight on your shoulders.' In November 2011, Geoff Dyer fulfilled a childhood dream: spending time on an aircraft carrier. Geoff 's stay on the USS George Bush - on active service in the Arabian Gulf - proved even more intense, memorable - and frequently hilarious - than he could ever have hoped. The warship become a microcosm for a stocktaking of modern Western life: Religion, drugs, chauvinism, farting, gyms, steaks, prayer, parental death, relationships and how to have a beach party with 5000 people on a giant floating hunk of steel. Piercingly perceptive and gloriously funny, this is a unique book about work, war and entering other worlds.
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The Missing of the Somme

The Missing of the Somme

Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer

Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun,looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him. A photograph from the war, is also a photograph of the way the war will be remembered. It is a photograph of the future,of the future's view of the past.Geoff Dyer's classic book is an original and personal meditation upon war and remembrance. It weaves a network of myth and memory, photos and films, poetry and sculptures, graveyards and ceremonies that illuminate our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War.
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(2012) Paris Trance

(2012) Paris Trance

Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer

In Paris, two couples form an intimacy that will change their lives forever. As they discover the clubs and cafés of the eleventh arrondissement, the four become inseparable, united by deeply held convictions about dating strategies, tunnelling in P.O.W. films and, crucially, the role of the Styrofoam cup in American thrillers. Experiencing the exhilarating highs of Ecstasy and sex, they reach a peak of rapture - but the come-down is unexpected and devastating. Dyer fixes a dream of happiness - and its aftermath. Erotic and elegiac, funny and romantic, Paris Trance confirms Dyer as one of Britain's most original and talented writers.
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Zona

Zona

Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer, described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘possibly the best living writer in Britain’, takes on his biggest challenge yet: unlocking the film that has obsessed him all his adult life.Magnificently unpredictable and hilarious (and surely one of the most unusual books ever written about cinema), Zona takes the reader on an enthralling, thought-provoking journey.The ostensible subject of Zona is the film Stalker, by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. As Dyer immerses us in the movie, it becomes apparent that Stalker is only the point of departure for a wonderfully digressive exploration of cinema, of how we understand our obsessions and of how we try to realise – and, discover – our deepest wishes.‘An impassioned, yet acerbic and wittyappraisal of a screen classic is a work of art in its own rights.’ Scotland on Sunday
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White Sands

White Sands

Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer

From one of Britain's most original writers, White Sands is a creative exploration of why we travel. Episodic, wide-ranging, funny and smart, the linked journeys recall the themes of Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It - albeit with the wisdom of (middle) age. From a trip to the Lightning Field in New Mexico, to chasing Gauguin's ghost in French Polynesia, from falling for someone who may or may not be a tour guide in Beijing's Forbidden City, to tracking down the house of an intellectual hero in Los Angeles, Dyer pursues all permutations of the peak experience including the trough experience. In his trademark style he blends travel writing, essay, criticism and fiction with a smart and cantankerous wit that is unmatched. This is a book for armchair travellers and procrastinating philosophers everywhere.
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Paris Trance

Paris Trance

Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer

Luke moves to Paris and, with his new love and the other expatriate couple from whom they become inseparable, wanders the Eleventh Arrondissement where clubs, cafés, banter, and ecstasy now occupy Gertrude Stein's city "which is not real but is really there."In Paris Trance, Geoff Dyer fixes a dream of happiness--and its aftermath--with photographic precision. Boldly erotic and hauntingly elegiac, comic and romantic, this brilliant reconception of the classic expatriate novels of the Lost Generation confirms Dyer as one of our most original and talented writers.
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