In eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skillfully evokes the music and the men who shaped modern jazz. Drawing on photos, anecdotes, and, most important, the way he hears the music, Dyer imaginatively reconstructs scenes from the embattled lives of some of the greats: Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonious Monk creating his own private language on the piano. However, music is the driving force of But Beautiful, and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician's style.

BUT BEAUTIFUL

Literature & Fiction

DYER, Geoff

Contemporary

RANDOM HOUSE UK

This work was written by someone who was born after the two world wars and who, like everyone of his and subsequent generations, have been brought up on the myth and memory of war. In this examination of the poems, memorials, memoirs, photographs, histories and documentaries of World War I, this book brings together a network of memory that illuminates people's relation to the past. The author brings to it his own experience - his father, who was at the Somme, watching "The Blue Max" and all the yesterdays on television, making airfix kits, buying poppies every November. By the end the reader understands more about war and memory, tenderness, horror, the comfort of landscape, the morality and immorality of order and disorder.

The Missing of the Somme

Biographies & Memoirs

Penguin Books, Ltd.

The Search

Penguin

This novel, from the author of "Ways of Telling", concerns a group of friends in Brixton whose lives offer a complex commentary on the experience of post-modernity.

The Colour of Memory

JONATHAN CAPE.

But Beautiful

British & Irish

"Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun, looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him..." A poetic and impressionistic tribute to those who perished in World War I--and those who lived, haunted by their memories. "Brilliant--the Great War book of our time."--Observer.

The missing of the Somme

History

Europe

Hamish Hamilton

Walker is at a party where he meets Rachel. Two days later she turns up at his apartment. But it's not Walker she wants, but her husband Malory who has gone missing. She wants Walker to find him. The author won the 1992 Somerset Maugham Award for "A Book About Jazz".

The search

Hamish Hamilton Ltd.

A New York Times Notable Book A Best Book of the Year: The Economist, The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Slate.com, and Time In Venice, at the Biennale,Â a jaded, bellini-swigging journalist named Jeff AtmanÂ meets a beautiful woman and they embark on a passionate 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.Â Their journeyâ€”as only the irrepressibly entertaining Geoff Dyer could conjureâ€”makes for an uproarious, fiendishly inventive novel of Italy and India, longing andÂ lust, and the prospect of neurotic enlightenment.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: A Novel

Literary

Pantheon

From a writer whose mastery encompasses fiction, criticism, and the fertile realm between the two, comes a new book that confirms his reputation for the unexpected. In Zona, Geoff Dyer attempts to unlock the mysteries of a film that has haunted him ever since he first saw it thirty years ago: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. (“Every single frame,” declared Cate Blanchett, “is burned into my retina.”) As Dyer guides us into the zone of Tarkovsky’s imagination, we realize that the film is only the entry point for a radically original investigation of the enduring questions of life, faith, and how to live. In a narrative that gives free rein to the brilliance of Dyer’s distinctive voice—acute observation, melancholy, comedy, lyricism, and occasional ill-temper—Zona takes us on a wonderfully unpredictable journey in which we try to fathom, and realize, our deepest wishes. Zona is one of the most unusual books ever written about film, and about how art—whether a film by a Russian director or a book by one of our most gifted contemporary writers—can shape the way we see the world and how we make our way through it.

Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

A New York Times Notable Book A Best Book of the Year: The Economist, The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Slate.com, and Time In Venice, at the Biennale, a jaded, bellini-swigging journalist named Jeff Atman meets a beautiful woman and they embark on a passionate 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 conjure—makes for an uproarious, fiendishly inventive novel of Italy and India, longing and lust, and the prospect of neurotic enlightenment.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Humor

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

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Books by DYER, Geoff