Granta Paperbacks
4 total works
In this classic of art criticism, one of our foremost cultural historians grapples with the life and work of one of the twentieth century's most mercurial and prodigious artists. In The Success and Failure of Picasso, John Berger places the artist in the historical, social and political contexts that made his work possible.
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.
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.
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.