The writing career of Booker Prize winner John Berger–poet, storyteller, playwright, and essayist–has yielded some of the most original and compelling examinations of art and life of the past half century. In this essential volume, Geoff Dyer has brought together a rich selection of many of Berger’s seminal essays.Berger’s insights make it impossible to look at a painting, watch a film, or even visit a zoo in quite the same way again. The vast range of subjects he addresses, the le...

How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever."Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.""But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fac...

In this luminous novel about a modern Don Juan, John Berger relates the story of G., a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century as Europe teeters on the brink of war.With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the libertine's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of thos...

Weaving art criticism with poetry, memoir with political commentary, this collection of essays is a prompt to reimagine the worldIn The Sense of Sight, John Berger considers the peculiar and complex practice of attentive observation. Ranging through subjects as distant from each other as the Renaissance from Hiroshima, encountering artists such as Goya, Dürer, and Van Gogh, Berger explores the deeply political nature of our engagement with the visual world...

A wrenching portrait of the Russian sculptor and a tribute to the potential of political artJohn Berger explores the life and work of Ernst Neizvestny, who, after clashing with Khrushchev, was excluded from the ranks of officially approved Soviet artists. Abandoned to obscurity, Neizvestny laboured to realize a monumental and very public vision of art. Exiled to the United States, he finally found recognition, returning to his homeland with the fall of the Berlin W...

A NYRB Classics OriginalWinner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize for TranslationA young soldier learns the true meaning of fear amidst the carnage of World War I in this literary masterpiece and “one of the most effective indictments of war ever written” (Wall Street Journal)1915: Jean Dartemont heads off to the Great War, an eager conscript. The only thing he fears is missing the action. Soon, however, the vaunted “war to end al...

“A rich and lovely exploration of art history” from the world-renowned art critic behind Ways of Seeing (Slate)!A diverse cast of artists comes to life in this jargon-free study Zadie Smith hails as “among the greatest books on art I’ve ever read.”One of the world’s most celebrated art writers takes us through centuries of drawing and painting, revealing his lifelong fascination with a diverse cast of artists. Berger groun...

The cast-offs of modern urban society are driven out onto the edges of the city and left to make a life there for themselves. They are not, however, in any natural wilderness, but in a world of refuse and useless junk - a place which denies any form of sustainable life. Here, the unemployed, the homeless, the old and the bereft struggle to build shelters out of old tin cans, scavenge for food and fight against insuperable odds. And yet somehow they survive: it seems that society thrives on...

A moving novel of a life transformed by passion, by the Booker Prize-winning author of G.John Berger, storyteller, critic and political writer, brings us this tender and bittersweet novel of a man’s dreams of freedom and romance. In his sixty-third year, quite unexpectedly, William Corker, the genteel proprietor of a London employment agency, moves out of the house he has shared with his overbearing sister for most of his life. In this poignant tale of a l...

“What makes shit such a universal joke is that it’s an unmistakable reminder of our duality, of our soiled nature and of our will to glory. It is the ultimate lèse-majesté”.John Berger’s essay begins by describing the experience of burying a year’s worth of his household’s excrement. What follows is an extended reflection—at once philosophically detached and profoundly engaged with the inescapable stuff of life—on shit as an emblem of what it means to be human: on our simu...

The revolutionary nature of art, from the groundbreaking author of Ways of SeeingThe Moment of Cubism is one of John Berger’s most important collections of art criticism. Whether considering Vermeer in his studio, Poussin’s poignant meditation on death, or the complexities of Rodin’s sculpture, Berger draws together the threads that bind individual artists to their social and political context. Here Berger argues that Cubism was a moment rather th...

'Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as though through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless ... In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses'.When John Berger wrote this apparently unclassifiable book, it was to become a sensation, translated into nine languages and indelible from the minds of those who read it. This stunning work is a shoebox filled with del...