by John Berger
Leopardi
1. Giacomo Leopardi, Moral Tales, trans. Patrick Creagh (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
A Story for Aesop
1. Danilo Dolci, Sicilian Lives (New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 171.
2. José Ortega y Gasset, Historical Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 187.
Sources
Where no prior source is indicated, a piece is assumed to have been first published in book form. Otherwise the pieces were first published — sometimes with different titles, in different versions — as follows.
Permanent Red
All pieces first published in the New Statesman
The Moment of Cubism
The Moment of Cubism: New Left Review
The Historical Function of the Museum, The Changing View of Man in the Portrait, Art and Property Now, Image of Imperialism, Nude in a Fur Coat, Mathias Grünewald, L. S. Lowry, Alberto Giacometti, Pierre Bonnard, Auguste Rodin: New Society
The Painter in His Studio: Vermeer: Punch
Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin: New Statesman
The Maja Dressed and The Maja Undressed: Goya: Sunday Times Magazine
Toulouse-Lautrec: Observer
Frans Hals: Sunday Times Magazine
The Look of Things
Peter Peri, Zadkine, Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin, Painting a Landscape, Understanding a Photograph, The Political Uses of Photo-Montage, The Sight of a Man, Revolutionary Undoing, Past Seen from a Possible Future, The Nature of Mass Demonstrations: New Society
Le Corbusier, Drawings by Watteau, Thicker than Water: New Statesman Fernand Léger: Marxism Today
The Booker Prize Speech: Guardian (24 November 1972)
About Looking
All previously published in New Society except:
Between Two Colmars, Romaine Lorquet: Guardian
Turner and the Barber’s Shop, Rouault and the Suburbs of Paris: Réalities
The White Bird
The Storyteller, On the Bosphorus, The Theatre of Indifference, The Hals Mystery, In a Moscow Cemetery, François, Georges and Amélie: A Requiem in Three Parts, Drawn to That Moment, The Eyes of Claude Monet, The Work of Art, The Hour of Poetry, Leopardi, The Production of the World: New Society
The Eaters and the Eaten: Guardian
Modigliani’s Alphabet of Love: Village Voice
Ernst Fischer: A Philosopher and Death: Introduction to his autobiography, An Opposing Man: The Autobiography of a Romantic Revolutionary (New York: Liverlight, 1974)
Mayakovsky: His Language and His Death: 7 Days
The First and Last Recipe: Ulysses: Guardian
Keeping a Rendezous
Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye, The Soul and the Operator: Expressen
That Which Is Held: Village Voice
A Load of Shit, Imagine Paris, The Opposite of Naked, Drawing on Paper: Harper’s Magazine
Mother: Threepenny Review
A Story for Aesop: partly in Granta, partly in Village Voice Literary Supplement A Kind of Sharing, The Third Week of August, 1991: Guardian
Christ of the Peasants: exhibition catalogue published by the Arts Council of Great Britain
A Professional Secret: New Society
Ape Theatre: Granta
A Household: New Statesman & Society
Erogenous Zone: El Pais
A Note on the Editor
Geoff Dyer’s first book, Ways of Telling, was a critical study of John Berger; since then he has published seven works of fiction and non-fiction, including But Beautiful, Out of Sheer Rage, (a finalist, in America, for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Paris Trance and, most recently, Anglo-English Attitudes, a collection of essays.
ALSO BY JOHN BERGER
CORKER’S FREEDOM
This novel is the unforgettable, often comical portrait of a dreamer, one William Corker, the genteel proprietor of a London employment agency, who, in his sixty-third year, has just moved out of the house he shared with his overbearing sister. As Corker takes his first steps into a life of the passions, Berger creates a character of astonishing depth and liveliness.
Fiction/Literature
KING
Beside the highway, in a wasteland furnished with smashed trucks and broken washing machines, lives a vagrant community of once hopeful individuals. Stealing meat from the butcher and sharing the warmth of his flesh, King, our canine narrator, bears witness to one couple’s vulnerability, endurance, and sacred history of better times.
Fiction/Literature
G.
Winner of the Booker Prize, G. relates the story of a young man forging an energetic sexual career at the turn of the century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women to reveal the conditions of Don Juan’s success: his essential loneliness, the culmination of his sexual experiences, the tenderness that infuses the briefest encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through him.
Fiction/Literature
A PAINTER OF OUR TIME
An expatriate Hungarian painter named Janos Lavin has disappeared following a triumphant one-man show at a fashionable gallery. Lavin’s diaries—found, translated, and annotated by his friend John—suggest far more than the motives for his disappearance: they also reveal the ways in which a man may reconcile the solitary call of art with the demands of conscience.
Fiction/Literature
PHOTOCOPIES
Encounters
Berger presents a collection of moments, each supremely vivid, that make up a frieze of human history at the end of the millennium as well as a subtle and affecting self-portrait of their author. Using careful, intensely visual prose snapping frozen vignettes of life, these twenty-nine “photocopies” teach us about lying and self-invention, dignity and tenderness, charity and courage.
Literature/Memoir
TO THE WEDDING
In To the Wedding, Gino and Ninon are getting married. Their stories—and those of Ninon’s mother and father—are told by a blind Greek peddler, who hears everything: waterfalls, the roar of a motorcycles, prayers, the chat of computer hackers, the music that Ninon will dance to on her wedding day. Here is a novel both tragic and joyous, intelligent and erotic, a transcendent celebration of passion.
Fiction/Literature
ALSO AVAILABLE:
About Looking
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Another Way of Telling
Art and Revolution
A Fortunate Man
Keeping a Rendezvous
Lilac and the Flag
Once in Europa
Pig Earth
Selected Essays of John Berger
Sense of Sight
The Shape of a Pocket
The Success and Failure of Picasso
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
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