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Geoff Dyer

Pop Culture

Staff Picks: Flavorwire’s Favorite Cultural Things This Week

By Julia Pugachevsky on

Need a great book to read, album to listen to, or TV show to get hooked on? The Flavorwire team is here to help: in this new weekly feature, our editorial staffers each recommend the cultural object or experience they’ve enjoyed the most in the past seven days. Click through for our picks, and tell us what you’ve been loving in the comments. … Read More

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Books

The 25 Greatest Essay Collections of All Time

By Emily Temple on

This week marks the release of Aleksandar Hemon’s excellent book of personal essays, The Book of My Lives, which we loved, and which we’re convinced deserves a place in the literary canon. To that end, we were inspired to put together our list of the greatest essay collections of all time, from the classic to the contemporary, from the personal to the critical. In making our choices, we’ve steered away from posthumous omnibuses and multi-author compilations, and given what might be undue weight to our favorite writers (as one does). Click through to see our nominations for the 25 greatest essay collections of all… Read More

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Books

10 Books That Could Save Your Life

By Emily Temple on

This week marked the release of Reality Hunger author David Shields’ newest book, How Literature Saved My Life, a wonderfully meandering meditation on reading, writing, and the reason for art. In that spirit, we offer ten books that just might save your life — some which Shields mentions in his latest, some of which are our own favorites.… Read More

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Books

21 Famous Authors Write 140-Character Novels

By Emily Temple on

We’ve all been lectured about the simplistic perfection of Ernest Hemingway’s six-word short story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”), but would it be possible to write a bite-sized novel the same way? This week, The Guardian asked 21 authors to try their hands at “Twitter fiction” — an entire “novel” in 140 characters.… Read More

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Books

Contemporary Writers and Their Old School Counterparts

By Emily Temple on

This week, we read an article over at The Guardian which suggested that the “anxiety of influence” is waning — that is, that writers publishing today are no longer as closely influenced by the literary canon as they once were, and instead look to their contemporaries. Well, considering that this conclusion was the result of a mathematical study based on the number of “content-free” words like ‘of’, ‘at’ and ‘by,’ we’re not sure how much water it holds, but it inspired us to think about some modern writers who do seem to be carrying the torch for their old school counterparts, whether in topic, thematic style, or character. After all, the past never really goes away — especially in… Read More

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Books

2011 National Book Critics Circle Award Winners Announced

By Emily Temple on

Last night, at an event held in the New School’s Tishman Auditorium, the National Book Critics Circle presented awards to its 2011 winners in fiction, nonfiction, biography, poetry, autobiography, and criticism. The list of finalists, announced back in January, was particularly impressive, at least to our eye, so the winners are doubly so. The National Book Critics Circle Awards are the only American awards chosen by the critics themselves, seeking every year to “honor the best literature published in English” as well as to “foster a national conversation about reading, criticism and literature.” Click through to see the winners, and let us know if you think the NBCC made the right choices in the comments. … Read More

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Books

National Book Critics Circle 2011 Finalists Announced

By Emily Temple on

Last night, at an event held at Artists Space in downtown Manhattan, the National Book Critics Circle announced its finalists in six categories — autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry — for the 2011 publishing year. The NBCC Awards are singular in that they are the only awards chosen by the critics themselves, seeking every year to “honor the best literature published in English” as well as to “foster a national conversation about reading, criticism and literature.” The winners will be announced at a ceremony on March 8th, 2012, but for now, click through to see the nominees and let us know which ones you’re rooting for — or whether you think they completely missed the mark. … Read More

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Books

Read Some of the Meanest Book Reviews of the Year

By Judy Berman on

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending may have been one of 2011′s most acclaimed novels, scooping up the Man Booker Prize and eliciting all manner of ecstatic praise. But it didn’t impress the brilliant and iconoclastic writer Geoff Dyer, who reviewed the book for The New York Times, and found that “any extreme expression of opinion about The Sense of an Ending feels inappropriate. It isn’t terrible, it is just so . . . average. It is averagely compelling (I finished it), involves an average amount of concentration and, if such a thing makes sense, is averagely well written: excellent in its averageness!”

It’s impossible to deny the fun in reading a nasty review that also happens to be smart, lively, and hilarious. So, if you enjoyed the excerpt above, chances are you’ll love all eight pieces that made the shortlist for The Omnivore‘s first annual Hatchet Job of the Year Award, which honors what its judges deem “the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review published in a newspaper or magazine in 2011.” The winner will be announced February 7th. See who joins Dyer among the finalists after the jump, let us know which review you think is most deliciously mean. … Read More

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Books

First Impressions of Geoff Dyer’s New NYT Column

By Emily Temple on

Beginning this weekend, formidable British author Geoff Dyer will begin writing a column for the New York Times Sunday Book Review entitled “Reading Life,” in which (the editors tell us) he will detail “the ups and down of his long relationship with the written word.” Today’s inaugural column, which you can… Read More

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