The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays of D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence

nov 2019 · New York Review of Books

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You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly controversial novelist who transformed, for better and for worse, the way we write about sex and emotions; he was a wonderful poet; he was an essayist of burning curiosity, expansive lyricism, odd humor, and radical intelligence, equaled, perhaps, only by Virginia Woolf. Here Geoff Dyer, one of the finest essayists of our day, draws on the whole range of Lawrence’s published essays to reintroduce him to a new generation of readers for whom the essay has become an important genre. We get Lawrence the book reviewer, writing about Death in Venice and welcoming Ernest Hemingway; Lawrence the travel writer, in Mexico and New Mexico and Italy; Lawrence the memoirist, depicting his strange sometime-friend Maurice Magnus; Lawrence the restless inquirer into the possibilities of the novel, writing about the novel and morality and addressing the question of why the novel matters; and, finally, the Lawrence who meditates on birdsong or the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains. Dyer’s selection of Lawrence’s essays is a wonderful introduction to a fundamental, dazzling writer.

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D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930), a novelist, storywriter, critic, poet, and painter, was one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century English literature. Among his many works are Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love.
 
Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England. He is the author of four novels—Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi—and several works of nonfiction, including Ways of Telling, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, and Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a writer in residence at the University of Southern California.