John Berger Bookshelf
A collection of books from the revolutionary thinker John Berger, to mark the launch of our new John Berger series.
“John Berger teaches us how to think, how to feel how to stare at things until we see what we thought wasn’t there. But above all, he teaches us how to love in the face of adversity. He is a master.” — Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things
John Berger (1926-2017) was one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years. We're proud to have published many of his books, including the first three installments of a new series, which will reissue many of his classic works.
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In Permanent Red, John Berger argues that the contemporary artist should strive for a realism that aims for hope, to transform the world. Surveying the work of historical artists as well as that of near contemporaries such as Picasso, Léger and Matisse, he explores the role of the artist, dividing these figures into those that struggle, those that fail, and the true masters. He explains why we should study the work of the past: in order to understand the present and to rethink the future.
First published in 1960, Permanent Red established John Berger as a firebrand critic willing to broadcast controversial opinions on some of the most important British artists of the day, including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
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From the ‘ War on Terror’ to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the uses of art as an instrument of political resistance. Visceral and passionate, Hold Everything Dear is a profound meditation on the far extremes of human behaviour, and the underlying despair. Looking at Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, he makes an impassioned attack on the poverty and loss of freedom at the heart of such unnecessary suffering.
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The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (a.k.a. Bento) spent the most intense years of his short life writing. He also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes—but no drawings.
In this beautifully illustrated book, Berger uses the imaginative space opened up in this experiment to explore politics, storytelling, Spinoza’s life and times, and the process of drawing itself.
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Landscapes offers a tour of the history of art, but not as you know it; bringing together Berger's most penetrating insights into how we may engage with both art and the artist in society.
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“A volume whose breadth and depth bring it close to a definitive self-portrait of one of Britain’s most original thinkers” – Financial Times
In penetrating and singular prose, Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture.
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Drawing on first-hand, unpublished interviews and archival sources only recently made available, Joshua Sperling digs beneath the moments of controversy to reveal a figure of remarkable complexity and resilience. The portrait that emerges is of a cultural innovator as celebrated as he was often misunderstood, and a writer increasingly driven as much by what he loved as by what he opposed. A Writer of Our Time brings the many faces of John Berger together, repatriating one of our great minds to the intellectual dramas of his and our time.
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A beautifully imagined story of love and resistance, by one of the foremost novelists of our age.
“Wrought with a miniaturist's precision.” – New York Times
“From A to X is one of the most tender and poignant books I have read for many years. Its power rests in its economy of means, its account of enduring love surviving oppression. It demonstrates that however foul the forces oppressing us, love and the human spirit are indestructible.” – Harold Pinter
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NOT AVAILABLE IN NORTH AMERICA
Exiled in London, the Hungarian artist Janos Lavin disappears one day, into thin air. His journal offers his friend John the only clues to where he has gone, and why. John Berger's first novel is a passionate exploration of the artistic process, and a gripping detective story.
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In A Seventh Man, John Berger and Jean Mohr come to grips with what it is to be a migrant worker—the material circumstances and the inner experience—and, in doing so, reveal how the migrant is not so much on the margins of modern life, but absolutely central to it. First published in 1975, this finely wrought exploration remains as urgent as ever, presenting a mode of living that pervades the countries of the West and yet is excluded from much of its culture.
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NOT AVAILABLE IN NORTH AMERICA
"A contemporary masterpiece"—New York Review of Books
A powerfully unsettling, mordantly witty story about the pitfalls of free will. In the course of a day, the ageing owner of an employment agency is propelled into a fantasy world through his romantic yearnings and inarticulate dreams, seeking an illusory freedom from the bonds of responsibility.
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Writers and activists consider the global consequences of the War on Terror.
