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FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD "In the spirit of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot and Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it . . . a wild book."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
Geoff Dyer was a talented young writer, full of energy and reverence for the craft, and determined to write a study of D. H. Lawrence. But he was also thinking about a novel, and about leaving Paris, and maybe moving in with his girlfriend in Rome, or perhaps traveling around for a while. Out of Sheer Rage is Dyer's account of his struggle to write the Lawrence book--a portrait of a man tormented, exhilerated, and exhausted. Dyer travels all over the world, grappling not only with his fascinating subject but with all the glorious distractions and needling anxieties that define the life of a writer. Geoff Dyer is the author of But Beautiful: A Book about Jazz and Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in England. National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Geoff Dyer had always wanted to write a book about D. H. Lawrence. He wanted, in fact, to write his "Lawrence book." The problem was, he had no idea what his "Lawrence book" would be, though he was determined to write a "sober academic study." Luckily for the reader, he failed miserably.
Out of Sheer Rage is a harrowing, comic, and grand act of literary deferral. At times a furious repudiation of the practice of writing itself, this is not so much a book about Lawrence as a book about writing a book about Lawrence. As Lawrence wrote about his own study of Thomas Hardy, "it will be about anything but Thomas Hardy, I am afraid—queer stuff—but not bad." "A potently distilled treatise on literature."—The New Yorker
"Smart and furious enough to justify its many detours. This book is a rant—not a meditation, never a meditation!—on pique and procrastination but primarily on that chronic, commonly occuring brand of perversity that defies psychiatric classification . . . [Dyer is] a comic antihero well-suited to our time."—Kelly Murphy Mason, The Washington Post
"In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it to . . . A wild book."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
"His brand of imaginative criticism illuminates a direction where literary criticism might go. If only we could have more fresh, insightful, energetic works such as Dyer's."—Jenifer Berman, Bomb
"An intriguing, magnetic, genre-rattling book."—Viola von Harrach, The Sunday Times ...
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This isn't a self-help book, it's about how Dyer could do with a little help... In funny and thought-provoking prose, the author describes a life most of us would love to live and how that life frustrates and aggravates him....
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This isn’t a self-help book; it’s a book about how Geoff Dyer could do with a little help. In mordantly funny and thought-provoking prose, the author of Out of Sheer Rage describes a life most of us would love to live—and how that life frustrates and aggravates him.
As he travels from Amsterdam to Cambodia, Rome to Indonesia, Libya to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert, Dyer flounders about in a sea of grievances, with fleeting moments of transcendental calm his only reward for living in a perpetual state of motion. But even as he recounts his side-splitting misadventures in each of these locales, Dyer is always able to sneak up and surprise you with insight into much more serious matters. Brilliantly riffing off our expectations of external and internal journeys, Dyer welcomes the reader as a companion, a fellow perambulator in search of something and nothing at the same time....
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In Venice, Jeff Atman, a jaded, bellini-swigging journalist meets a beautiful woman at the Bienalle and embarks on a drug-soaked, sex-filled, life-changing affair.
In Varanasi, an unnamed journalist (who may or may not be Jeff) joins thousands of pilgrims on the banks of the holy Ganges. He intends to stay for a few days but ends up remaining for months.
Their journey—as only the irrepressibly entertaining Geoff Dyer could contemplate—makes for an uproarious, fiendishly inventive novel of longing, lust, and neurotic enlightenment....
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