Description

Sitting down to write a book about his hero D.H. Lawrence, Geoff Dyer finds himself compelled to write about anything else. He is in fact compelled to do more or less anything else instead of write. In Sicily he is too preoccupied by his hatred of seafood to follow the great writer’s footsteps; in Mexico he cannot get beyond a drug-induced erotic fantasy on a nudist beach . . . And yet, incredibly, this attempt to write a ‘sober academic study’ reveals the hold Lawrence and his work still exert on us today.

Out of Sheer Rage is a complete one-off, a richly comic study of the combination of bad temper, procrastination and the uncanny power of obliquity.

Publisher Review

An intriguing, magnetic, genre-rattling book * * The Times * * Marvellous . . . a glorious truant from study . . . gives a better picture of (Lawrence) than any biography I know. -- James Wood * * Guardian * * The kind of book that gives literary criticism a bad name. Hilarious! -- John Berger A masterpiece * * Mail on Sunday * * If there was a prize for the year's funniest book then it would win hands down * * Independent on Sunday * * Quite possibly the best living writer in Britain * * Daily Telegraph * * A national treasure -- Zadie Smith One of my favourite of all contemporary writers. I love his sense of the absurd, his pessimism mixed with robust good cheer, his beautifully crafted sentences, his jokes and his intelligence. -- Alain de Botton Geoff Dyer is a true original - one of those rare voices in contemporary literature that never ceases to surprise, disturb and delight. Risky, breathtakingly candid, intellectual, cool, outrageous, laconic and sometimes shocking, Geoff Dyer is a must-read for our confused and perplexing times. -- William Boyd [Out of Sheer Rage] gets the full Canongate Canons treatment from its new Edinburgh publishers this month; happy, happy news if ever there was any, O.O.S.R is vintage Dyer, and well worthy of this upgrade to 'modern classic' status. * * Dazed and Confused * * Reading this book is the very opposite of a waste of time. It is an education and a delight * * Guardian * *