From A to X: A Story in Letters
In the dusty, ramshackle town of lives A’ida. Her insurgent lover Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A’ida’s letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But the area is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity — an intimate dance, a shared meal — assume for A’ida a life-affirming significance, acts of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them.
From A to X is a powerful exploration of how humanity affirms itself in struggle: imagining a community which, besieged by economic and military imperialism, finds transcendent hope in the pain and fragility, vulnerability and sorrow of daily existence.
Hardback, 199 pages
ISBN: 9781844672882
September 2008
$22.95 / £12.99
Other Editions
ISBN: 9781844673612
April 2009
$13.95 / £7.99
Reviews
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“John Berger has given us an exquisite thing. This is a book of controlled rage sculpted with tools of tenderness and a searing political vision. Everything he writes about is profound, precise and invoiced: Liberty and the lack of it, hope and the lack of it, power and the lack of it, love and the terrible yearning that takes its place when the loved one has been taken away.”
Blog
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John Berger at the BFI
To commemorate the 40th anniversary of John Berger's influential Ways of Seeing, the groundbreaking book and television series which have become staples of art critcism, the British Film Institute is staging a series of screenings and events based upon the author's small-screen films.
Berger's stunning series explored the history of representation in Western art, interrogating well-worn tropes of classical art education with a razor-sharp Marxist critique. The book and series cemented Berger's role as one of Britain's most lucid and engaging cultural critics, a role he continues to fill today with his challenging, sharply-written books on aesthetics, culture and contemporary politics, including Hold Everything Dear and Bento's Sketchbook.
As well as screening the original Ways of Seeing in it's entirety, the BFI season also features his early television work for BBC's Monitor and Granada TV, and runs throughout April. A selection of Berger's books will also be on sale at the event.
Visit BFI Online for more information on the series.
Discussions
Begin a discussionOther books by John Berger
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Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance
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A Painter of our Time
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A Seventh Man
by John Berger
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War With No End
by Phyllis Bennis, John Berger, et al.