John Berger

A furious homage to the homeless and a lyrical meditation on language and experience. You will be led to a place you haven't been, from where few stories come. You will be led by King, a dog (or is he?) to a wasteland beside the motorway called Saint Valery.

The centenary edition, with a newly commissioned introduction by Jo Hamya. 'Fascinating . . . an extraordinary mixture of historical detail and sexual meditation . . . G. belongs in the tradition of George Eliot, Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer.' New York Times In this luminous novel about a modern Don Juan, Berger relates the story of G., a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century as Europe teeters on the brink of war. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the libertine's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their liaisons with him. Set against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi's attempt to unite Italy, the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War and the dramatic first flight across the Alps, G. is a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in the turmoil of history.

The centenary edition, with a newly commissioned introduction by Berger’s biographer, Tom Overton. 'Instant readability . . . [Berger] makes one see [paintings] as statements or questions in a living language.' New Statesman 'One of the most influential intellectuals of our time' Observer 'Berger is a writer one demands to know more about . . . an intriguing and powerful mind and talent' New York Times As a novelist, essayist, and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight whose work amounts to a subtle, powerful critique of the canons of our civilization. In About Looking he explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. How do the animals we look at in zoos remind us of a relationship between man and beast all but lost in the twentieth century? What is it about looking at war photographs that doubles their already potent violence? How do the nudes of Rodin betray the threats to his authority and potency posed by clay and flesh? And how does solitude inform the art of Giacometti? In asking these and other questions, Berger alters the vision of anyone who reads his work.

Paying homage to the writers and thinkers who influenced him, John Berger pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his artist's eye makes him a storyteller, rather than a critic. His expansive perspective takes in artistic movements and individual artists-from the Renaissance to the present that completes a tour through the history of art that will be an intellectual benchmark for many years to come.

Compelling and intimate, this collection of letters between the celebrated art critic and essayist John Berger and his son Yves, an artist, is a moving look at their musings on art, memory, life, death, and beyond. Composed of letters written between 2015 and 2016, some of the last written by John Berger, along with images of works by old masters and contemporary art and some of the Bergers’ own drawings and watercolours, Over to You is an informal back-and-forth not unlike the ping-pong games father and son used to play in the barn of their house. It begins when John, who is in a Parisian suburb, sends Yves, who is in Haute-Savoie, an envelope of reproductions of art that have moved him. And so they begin to reveal their thoughts, looking at works by Goya, Watteau, Twombly, Joan Mitchell, Dürer, Caravaggio, Manet, and Euan Uglow, among many others. But the art is just a way to summon shared emotions and memories, as well as deepen their understanding of the world and its mysteries. John, at eighty-nine, is the more formal teacher; Yves, at thirty-nine, is the younger, philosophical artist. There are John’s thoughts on everything from the use of colour, light and space in, say, a Dürer or a Beckmann to the question of 'staying fully alive.' Yves notes how much in life exceeds our understanding, the gap between our consciousness and our feeling, between the said and the unsaid. 'That’s the zone where I would like us to meet. Are you coming?' he asks his father. 'I may need other eyes to confirm what is really there. Like your eyes always did.' This is an exceptional and moving tribute to a relationship between a father and a son, and between two artists, as well as a thought-provoking look at questions we all have about work, time, the universe, life and death.

John Berger, one of the world's most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artists. Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. The result is an illuminating walk through many centuries of visual culture, from one of the contemporary world's most incisive critical voices.

In this brilliant collection of diverse works-essays, short stories, poems, translations-which spans a lifetime's engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing. He challenges readers to rethink their every assumption about the role of creativity in our lives. Paying homage to the writers and thinkers who influenced him, he pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his artist's eye makes him a storyteller, rather than a critic. His expansive perspective takes in artistic movements and individual artists-from the Renaissance to the present-while never neglecting the social and political context of their creation. Landscapes-alongside Portraits-completes a tour through the history of art that will be an intellectual benchmark for many years to come.

A pictoral essay by the great art critic, novelist and long-time smoker, John Berger, and Turkish writer and illustrator Selçuk Demirel. "Once upon a time, men, women and (secretly) children smoked." This charming illustrated work reflects on the cultural implications of smoking, and suggests, through a series of brilliantly inventive illustrations, that society's attitude to smoke is both paradoxical and intolerant. It portrays a world in which smokers, banished from public places, must encounter one another as outlaws. Meanwhile, car exhausts and factory chimneys continue to pollute the atmosphere. Smoke is a beautifully illustrated prose poem that lingers in the mind. "A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared you are both in that parenthesis. It's like a proscenium arch for a dialogue." - John Berger (in interview)

Based on the BBC television series, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is a unique look at the way we view art, published as part of the Penguin on Design series in Penguin Modern Classics.'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.''But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.' John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: 'This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.' By now he has. John Berger (b. 1926) is an art critic, painter and novelist.born in Hackney, London. His novel G. (1972) won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize. If you enjoyed Ways of Seeing, you might like Susan Sontag's On Photography, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of professional art critics ... he is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation'Peter Fuller, Arts Review'The influence of the series and the book ... was enormous ... It opened up for general attention areas of cultural study that are now commonplace'Geoff Dyer in Ways of Telling'One of the most influential intellectuals of our time'Observer

The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the new world economic order.

Booker-winning novelist, playwright, essayist, poet and critic, John Berger has excelled in a variety of literary fields. This collection of essays takes a definitive look at his career.

Seit Jahren lebt John Berger mit seiner Familie unter den französischen Bauern eines kleinen Dorfes in den Bergen Savoyens. Karg, streng und einfach mutet diese archaische Welt am Rande unserer heutigen Zivilisation an, und sie ist unwiderruflich zum Sterben verurteilt. Dennoch überlebt sie Tag für Tag, getragen von Langmut und Tradition, aber auch von der Gewohnheit, die Existenz durch die Arbeit der eigenen Hände zu sichern und zu erhalten. Bergers Liebe zu den Bauern hat ihre Wurzeln in der Erkenntnis dieses Widerspruchs. Und er hat eine besondere Fähigkeit, diese Einsicht erzählend zu vermitteln. Seine knappe, die bäuerliche Denk- und Empfindungsweise widerspiegelnde Sprache läßt den Lesenden unmittelbar teilhaben an den kleinen Geschichten des täglichen Lebens. Mit seinen so einfachen wie bewegenden Erzählungen hält John Berger die Erinnerung an eine Lebensform wach, für die es in der modernen Welt keinen Raum mehr gibt.

Examines the social implications and psychological impact of the images and conventions of modern and classical artists

This anthology of some of John Berger's most incisive and brilliant essays and articles, written throughout the 1960s, is one of his most celebrated books. The pieces span from the life of artists like Camille Corot and Fernand Léger; character sketches of the likes of Le Corbusier, Walter Benjamin, Jack Yeats, and Che Guevara; and reflections about the Czechoslovakian Revolution of 1969. In particular, in his seminal essay 'the Look of Things' Berger explores the power of drawing as a profound act of discovery: a private, autobiographical journey that transforms both artist and observer. Berger challenges us to see drawing not merely as a technical skill, but as a dialectical process: a slow, meticulous dissection of reality that reveals the essence of humanity itself.

The Sense of Sight is about our deeply political and human engagement with the visual world. Berger encourages us to question the way we see things, perceive them and ultimately judge what we see. He traces what vision means to us and its importance to see things differently. Ranging from the Renaissance to the conflagration of Hiroshima; from the Bosphorus to Manhattan; from the woodcarvers of a French village to Goya, Dürer, and Van Gogh; and from private experiences of love and of loss, to the major political upheavals of our time, John Berger encourages us to see with the same breadth, courage, and moral engagement.

The centenary edition, with an introduction by Nadeem Aslam. ‘You have a voice that couldn’t lie. There are voices that can’t lie.’ A blind Greek pedlar listens as a mother and father, estranged for years, travel across Europe to their daughter’s wedding. Ninon is marrying Gino in Italy. She is twenty-three years old and she is dying of AIDS. Fragments of conversations, songs and silence blend in a swirl of vignettes that are both tragic and joyous, erotic and wise. On their wedding day, Ninon takes off her shoes and dances barefoot with Gino as if they will never grow tired, as if their happiness is eternal, as if death will never touch them. To the Wedding is a novel of heartache, of hope and of a love that triumphs over death. ‘One of the greatest and most honest love stories of our time’ Colum McCann ‘No one knows more about the necessity of love than John Berger’ Anne Michaels ‘A masterpiece . . . a novel that will haunt you’ Sunday Telegraph

The centenary edition, with a newly commissioned introduction by Simon McBurney. ‘Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as though through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless ... In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses'. When John Berger wrote this apparently unclassifiable book, it was to become a sensation, translated into nine languages and indelible from the minds of those who read it. This stunning work is a shoebox filled with delicate love letters containing poetry and thoughts on mortality, art, love and absence, capturing moments in time that hover above Berger's surprising landscapes. From his lyrical description of the works of Caravaggio and profound explorations of death and immigration to the sight of some lilac at dusk in the mountains, this is a beautiful and most intimate response to the world around us.