Allen & Unwin Working the Room book Literature English Paperback 416 pages

'Dyer is becoming a character just as arch and seductive as that professional self-effacer from the previous generation, Alan Bennett' Observer

Alive with insight, wit and Dyer's characteristic irreverence, this collection of essays offers a guide around the cultural maze, mapping a route through the worlds of literature, art, photography and music.Besides exploring what it is that makes great art great, Working the Room ventures into more personal territory with extensive autobiographical pieces - 'On Being an Only Child', 'Sacked' and 'Reader's Block', among other gems. Dyer's breadth of vision and generosity of spirit combine to form a manual for ways of being in - and seeing - the world today.

Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as seven other non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Centre of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ's Writer of the Year. He lives in London.