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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

“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...

A new edition of John Berger and Jean Mohr's classic investigation into the nature of photography and what makes it so different from other art forms'One of the world's most influential art critics … Berger sees clearly with fresh surprise yet profound understanding' Washington TimesIn one of the most eloquent accounts of photography ever devised, the writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr set out to understand the funda...

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...

A powerful meditation on political resistance and the global search for justiceFrom the ‘War on Terror’ to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the uses of art as an instrument of political resistance. Visceral and passionate, Hold Everything Dear is a profound meditation on the far extremes of human behaviour, and the underlying despair. Looking at Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, he makes an impassioned att...

Why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Any artwork reflects the artist’s intentions, but also its times: therefore all art is politicalIn Permanent Red, John Berger argues that the contemporary artist should strive for a realism that aims for hope, to transform the world. Surveying the work of historical artists as well as that of near contemporaries such as Picasso, Léger and Matisse, he explores the role of the artist...