Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781555975791)

*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism*
*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice*
*A New York Times Top 10 Nonfiction Book of the Year, as selected by Dwight Garner*

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.

Author: Geoff Dyer
ISBN-10: 1555975798
ISBN-13: 9781555975791
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Language: English
Published: 03/29/2011
Pages: 432
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.47lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.40w x 1.23d
Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Winner

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 03/15/2011 pg. 15
New York Times Book Review 04/17/2011 pg. 17
New York Times Book Review 04/24/2011 pg. 22
Kirkus Reviews 12/01/2010
Publishers Weekly 12/13/2010
Foreword 02/28/2011
Entertainment Weekly 03/23/2012 pg. 12
New York Review of Books 05/24/2012 pg. 40