Yesterday marked ten years since the untimely death of the German writer W.G. Sebald. The New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog commemorated the occasion with a post about Sebald’s work, where Mark O’Connell noted his influence on the writers Teju Cole, Will Self and Geoff Dyer, who “have been inspired by Sebald’s figurative and literal Read More
Last night the British writer and essayist Geoff Dyer gave a reading at McNally Jackson bookstore in Soho. As it usually does when Geoff Dyer comes to New York, the conversation quickly turned to Doughnut Plant, and whether Mr. Dyer had sought out his preferred vanilla bean doughnut since arriving in New York Read More
In Boston, seven or eight years ago, after a reading Geoff Dyer gave to promote his Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, a collection of travel essays whose ethos is best encapsulated by the Bhagavad Gita’s claim that wise is the man who finds “action in inaction,” I dined with Mr. Read More
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
By Geoff Dyer
Pantheon, $24.00, 295 pages
Meet Jeff Atman, aging hack journalist:
“He was supposed to be writing a twelve-hundred-word so-called ‘think piece’ (intended to require zero thought on the part of the reader and scarcely more from the writer but still, somehow, beyond him) that had Read More
