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...

A stunning, unclassifiable work by one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers and writers, this book is an inspiring amalgam of letters, poetry, and profound musings on everything from Caravaggio to the nature of time itself.And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos may be the most original of John Berger’s books; certainly, it is among the most moving. A meditation on first and last things, it is divided into two parts, one reflecting on humanity’s r...

“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...

**In this Booker Prize–winning classic, a Casanova-esque young man searches for philosophical and sexual fulfillment as he seduces his way across Europe on the eve of World War I.John Berger's picaresque work, one of the author's finest novels, is an inspired exploration of intimacy and loneliness set at the turn of the twentieth century.**Who is G.? The illegitimate son of an Italian candy merchant and a rich young American divorcée, G. is born at the end of the nineteenth...

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...

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...

A magisterial collection of essays on what art tells us about ourselves, and the worldThe Sense of Sight is about our deeply political and human engagement with the visual world. Berger encourages us to question the way we see things, perceive them and ultimately judge what we see. He traces what vision means to us and its importance to see things differently. Ranging from the Renaissance to the conflagration of Hiroshima; from the Bosphorus to Manhattan; from the ...

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...

When the Japanese Empire went to war with the Allies in December 1941, it had already been fighting in China for 10 years. During that time it had conquered huge areas of China, and subjugated millions of people. The Japanese needed to control the Chinese population in these occupied territories, and for this reason they set up governments from amongst the leaders of the Chinese who were willing to co-operate with them. These so-called ‘puppet’ governments were designed to rule on behalf o...

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...