Description: "Walter Benjamin once said that every great work dissolves a genre or founds a new one. But is it only masterpieces that have a monopoly on novelty? What if a writer had written several works that rose to Benjamin's high definition, not all great, perhaps, but so different from one another, so peculiar to their author, and so inimitable that each founded its own, immediately self-dissolving genre? The English writer Geoff Dyer delights in producing books that are unique, like keys. There is nothing anywhere like Dyer's semi-fictional rhapsody about jazz, But Beautiful, or his book about the First World War, The Missing of the Somme, or his autobiographical essay about D. H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, or his essayistic travelogue, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do it. Dyer's work is so restlessly various that it moves somewhere else before it can gather a family. He combines fiction, autobiography, travel writing, cultural criticism, literary theory, and a kind of comic English whining. The result ought to be a mutant mulch but is almost always a louche and canny delight."-James Wood, The New Yorker "There is no contemporary writer I admire more than Dyer, and in no book of his does he address his animating idea-The Only Way Not to Waste Time Is to Waste It-more overtly, urgently, empathetically and eloquently." David Shields, author of Reality Hunger "Few books about film feel like watching a film, but this one does. We sit with Dyer as he writes about Stalker ; he captures its mystery and burnish, he prises it open and gets its glum majesty. As a result of this book, I know the film better, and care about Tarkovsky even more." Mark Cousins, author of The Story of Film

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