THE TEN GREATEST ESSAYS, EVER
Martin Amis, “In Hefnerland” (from The Moronic Inferno, 1986)
Perry Anderson, “Components of the National Culture” (from English Questions, 1968)
Eve Babitz, “Bad Day at Palm Springs” (from Slow Days, Fast Company, 1977)
John Berger, “Turner and the Barber Shop” (from Selected Essays, 2003)
Meghan Daum, “The Joni Mitchell Problem” (from The Unspeakable, 2014)
Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole” (from Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1988)
D. H. Lawrence, “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine” (from 1925)
George Steiner, “Bad Friday” (on Simone Weil) (from The New Yorker, 1992)
David Foster Wallace, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce…” (from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 1997)
Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary” (from Resources of Hope, 1958)
About Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as nine non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography’s 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E.M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ’s Writer of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.