Selected Essays

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 lean beauty of his prose, and the keenness of his anger against injustice move us to view the world with a new lens of awareness. Whether he is discussing the singleminded intensity of Picasso’s Guernica, the parallel violence and alienation in the art of Francis Bacon and Walt Disney, or the enigmatic silence of his own mother, what binds these pieces throughout is the depth and fury of Berger’s passion, challenging us to participate, to protest, and above all, to see.

• Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series (Penguin Books for Art)
• About Looking
• To the Wedding
• Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (Vintage International)
• Portraits: John Berger on Artists
• The Shape of a Pocket
• Landscapes: John Berger on Art
• John Berger: Understanding a Photograph
• Another Way of Telling
• A Seventh Man