Reading list

John Berger Bookshelf

A collection of books from the revolutionary thinker John Berger, to mark the 50th anniversary of Ways of Seeing.

Verso Books13 January 2022

John Berger Bookshelf

“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

2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Ways of Seeing - the much loved 1972 TV series (and book) by John Berger. We're proud to have published many of his books, including Landscapes: John Berger on Art  and Portraits: John Berger on Artists - both edited by Tom Overton (you can listen to him share his thoughts on Radio 4's special anniversary show here).

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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Drawing on first-hand, unpublished interviews and archival sources only recently made available, Joshua Sperling digs beneath the moments of controversy to reveal a figure of remarkable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

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.

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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

In this illustrated color book John Berger uses the imaginative space he creates to explore the process of drawing, politics, storytelling and Spinoza’s life and times.

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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. 


Read more:
A Gift for John Berger by Ali Smith
To Tell a Story: John Berger and Susan Sontag in conversation 
John Berger at 90: The Verso podcast in collaboration with the London Review Bookshop

Landscapes
In this brilliant collection of diverse works—essays, short stories, poems, translations—which spans a lifetime’s engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of see...
Paperback
Portraits
John Berger, one of the world’s most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artis...
A Writer of Our Time
John Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers; as a TV pres...
From A to X
In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A’ida. Her insurgent husband Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A’ida’s letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the ...
Paperback
Hold Everything Dear
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, ...
Paperback (2016)
A Painter of our Time
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...
Paperback
A Seventh Man
Why does the Western world look to migrant laborers to perform the most menial tasks? What compels people to leave their homes and accept this humiliating situation? In A Seventh Man, John Berger a...
Paperback
Bento's Sketchbook
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 ...
Paperback (2015)
Corker's Freedom
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 romant...
Paperback
War With No End
On October 7th 2001, US-led forces invaded Afghanistan, marking the start of George Bush and Tony Blair’s “War on Terror.” Six years on, where have the policies of Bush and Blair left us? Bringing ...
Paperback

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