Vintage International Series

This is a collection of portraits of a shepherd, a farmer, a painter and blind man, a sylph of Byzantine arrogance and a vagabond cyclist with primroses growing in her basket. The backgrounds range from Prague, Paris, Athens, Lahore and countrysides and mountainscapes. John Berger is the author of "About Looking", "Ways of Seeing", "Art and Revolution", "G" - for which he won the Booker Prize, and the trilogy "Into Their Labours", consisting of "Pig Earth", "Once in Europe" and "Lilac and Flag". His latest novel is "To the Wedding".

Another Way of Telling

by John Berger

Published 12 May 1982

“There are no photographs which can be denied. All photographs have the status of fact. What is to be examined is in what way photography can and cannot give meaning to facts.” With these words, two of our most thoughtful and eloquent interrogators of the visual offer a singular meditation on the ambiguities of what is seemingly our straightforward art form.

As constructed by John Berger and the renowned Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, that theory includes images as well as words; not only analysis, but anecdote and memoir. Another Way of Telling explores the tension between the photographer and the photographed, between the picture and its viewers, between the filmed moment and the memories that it so resembles. Combining the moral vision of the critic and the practical engagement of the photographer, Berger and Moher have produced a work that expands the frontiers of criticism first charged by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag.

G.

by John Berger

Published 8 June 1972

Winner of the 1972 Booker Prize, this work centres on G, who seems impervious to everything around him. His interests are purely sexual, his crowning ideal, fulfilment. Yet in the end this is enough - for the politics of desire to expose the criminal politics of oppression. Berger has also written "Pig Earth" and "The White Bird".

Once in Europa

by John Berger

Published 12 February 1987

From Booker Prize-winning author John Berger, a luminous collection of interwoven stories, Once in Europa is a portrait of two worlds—a small Alpine village bound to the earth and by tradition, and the restless, future-driven culture that will invade it—at their moment of collision. The instrument of entrapment is love: the passion of a willful shepherd for a shrewd bourgeois housewife; of a vital young woman for a dashing Russian who has come to work in the local factory; of a steadfast son for his aged mother. Lives are lost and hearts are broken, and, always, love is a transcending form of grace. In Once in Europa, it speaks as plainly and as movingly as a remembered language, creating a work of astonishing tenderness.

Lilac and Flag

by John Berger

Published 5 May 1990

From Booker Prize-winning author John Berger, Lilac and Flag, wherein the Alpine village of the two earlier volumes of the Into Their Labours trilogy has been forsaken for the mythic city of Troy. Here, amidst the shantytowns, factories, and opulent hotels, fading heritages and steadfast dreams, the children and grandchildren of rural peasants pursue meager livings as best they can. And here, two young lovers embark upon a passionate, desperate journey of love and survival and find transcending hope both for themselves and for us as their witnesses.

The Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

Published 19 November 2001

Booker wining novelist, playwright, essayist, poet and critic - even admirers rarely know John Berger in all his literary incarnations. This collection of essays will, for the first time, take a definitive look at his extraordinary career. Far from being footnotes to the main body of work Berger's essays are absolutely central to it. Many of the ideas of the groundbreaking Ways of Seeing were presented first in essays published in New Society. Polemical, reflective, radically original, Berger's wide-ranging essays emphasise the continuities that have underpinned more than 40 years of tireless intellectual inquiry and political engagement. Viewed chronologically they add up, in fact, to a kind of vicarious autobiography and a history of our time as refracted through the prism of art. Edited by Geoff Dyer, and published on the occasion of his 75th birthday, this is an essential collection by one of the world's greatest writers.

The Shape of a Pocket

by John Berger

Published 23 July 2001

John Berger writes: '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. The people coming together are the reader, me and those the essays are about - Rembrandt, Palaeolithic cave painters, a Romanian peasant, ancient Egyptians, an expert in the loneliness of certain hotel bedrooms, dogs at dusk, a man in a radio station. And unexpectedly, our exchanges strengthen each of us in our conviction that what is happening to the world today is wrong, and that what is often said about it is a lie. I've never written a book with a greater sense of urgency.'

Art and Revolution

by John Berger

Published 22 February 1969

In this prescient and beautifully written book, Booker Prize-winning author John Berger examines the life and work of Ernst Neizvestny, a Russian sculptor whose exclusion from the ranks of officially approved Soviet artists left him laboring in enforced obscurity to realize his monumental and very public vision of art. But Berger's impassioned account goes well beyond the specific dilemma of the pre-glasnot Russian artist to illuminate the very meaning of revolutionary art. In his struggle against official orthodoxy--which involved a face-to-face confrontation with Khruschev himself--Neizvestny was fighting not for a merely personal or aesthetic vision, but for a recognition of the true social role of art. His sculptures earn a place in the world by reflecting the courage of a whole people, by commemorating, in an age of mass suffering, the resistance and endurance of millions.

"Berger is probably our most perceptive commentator on art.... A civilized and stimulating companion no matter what subject happens to cross his mind."--Philadelphia Inquirer

Here Is Where We Meet

by John Berger

Published 21 March 2005

No one appreciates the detail of being alive more than the dead. In Lisbon, a city that plays games, a man, John, encounters his mother sitting on a park bench. She laughs with the impudence of a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl. She has been dead fifteen years. In the Islington home of Hubert, his fellow student at art school, John remembers a girl he knew back then. To touch her skin was to sense a horizon, to be transported. He used to call her Oslo In this nomadic book which travels through fictions across Europe, seemingly disparate stories reveal themselves to be linked, mislaid objects find their place. Sensual memories from the past penetrate the present like salt. Cities - Madrid, Krakow, Lisbon, Geneva, London - are mapped as redolent hybrids of old world and new. As it passes frontiers and time-zones, Here is Where We Meet is beautiful, playful and unexpected.

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

by John Berger

Published 1 January 1984

Booker Prize-winning author John Berger reveals the ties between love and absence, the ways poetry endows language with the assurance of prayer, and the tensions between the forward movement of sexuality and the steady backward tug of time. He recreates the mysterious forces at work in a Rembrandt painting, transcribes the sensorial experience of viewing lilacs at dusk, and explores the meaning of home to early man and to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in our cities today. And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos is a seamless fusion of the political and personal.

Hold Everything Dear

by John Berger

Published 6 June 2007

From a Booker Prize-winning author and one of the most impassioned of writers of our time, this powerful collection of essays offers a stark portrait of post-9/11 realities. John Berger occupies a unique position in the international cultural landscape: artist, filmmaker, poet, philosopher, novelist, and essayist, he is also a deeply thoughtful political activist. In Hold Everything Dear, his artistry and activism meld in an attempt to make sense of the current state of our world.

Berger analyzes the nature of terrorism and the profound despair that gives rise to it. He writes about the homelessness of millions who have been forced by poverty and war to live as refugees. He discusses Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Serbia, Bosnia, China, Indonesia-anyplace where people are deprived of the most basic of freedoms. Berger powerfully acknowledges the depth of suffering around the world and suggests actions that might finally help bring it to an end.

A Fortunate Man

by John Berger

Published 11 May 1989

In this quietly revolutionary work of social observation and medical philosophy, Booker Prize-winning writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr train their gaze on an English country doctor and find a universal man--one who has taken it upon himself to recognize his patient's humanity when illness and the fear of death have made them unrecognizable to themselves. In the impoverished rural community in which he works, John Sassall tend the maimed, the dying, and the lonely. He is not only the dispenser of cures but the repository of memories. And as Berger and Mohr follow Sassall about his rounds, they produce a book whose careful detail broadens into a meditation on the value we assign a human life. First published thirty years ago, A Fortunate Man remains moving and deeply relevant--no other book has offered such a close and passionate investigation of the roles doctors play in their society.

"In contemporary letters John Berger seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience." --Susan Sontag

The Sense of Sight

by John Berger

Published 12 January 1986

With this provocative and infinitely moving collection of essays, a preeminent critic of our time responds to the profound questions posed by the visual world. For when Booker Prize-winning author John Berger writes about Cubism, he writes not only of Braque, Léger, Picasso, and Gris, but of that incredible moment early in this century when the world converged around a marvelous sense of promise. When he looks at the Modigliani, he sees a man’s infinite love revealed in the elongated lines of the painted figure.

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, The Sense of Sight encourages us to see with the same breadth, courage, and moral engagement that its author does.

Keeping a Rendezvous

by John Berger

Published 12 November 1991

When he stands before Giorgione's La Tempesta, Booker Prize-winning author John Berger sees not only the painting but our whole notion of time, sweeping us away from a lost Eden. A photograph of a gravely joyful crowd gathered on a Prague street in November 1989 provokes reflection on the meaning of democracy and the reunion of a people with long-banished hopes and dreams.

With the luminous essays in Keeping a Rendezvous, we are given to see the world as Berger sees it -- to explore themes suggested by the work of Jackson Pollock or J. M. W. Turner, to contemplate the wonder of Paris. Rendezvous are manifold: between critic and art, artist and subject, subject and the unknown. But most significant are the rendezvous between author and reader, as we discover our perceptions informed by Berger's eloquence and courageous moral imagination.

King

by John Berger

Published 11 February 1999

Set in a wasteland beside the motorway, this novel is a homage to the homeless and a meditation on language and experience. King, a dog (or is he?), tells his story of life with a group of homeless people who reside among the smashed lorries, old boilers and broken washing machines of Saint Valery.