Happy Birthday John Berger!
Happy birthday to John Berger - see our 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
John Berger was born on this day in 1926. He passed away in January of 2017, leaving a legacy of work that passionately speaks to our frustrations, fears, hopes, and desires. We're proud to have published many of his books, including Landscapes: John Berger on Art — a companion volume to Portraits: John Berger on Artists.
See also! John Berger at 90: The Verso podcast in collaboration with the London Review Bookshop.
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.
[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]“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.
Drawing on first-hand, unpublished interviews and archival sources only recently made available, Joshua Sperling digs beneath the moments of controversy to reveal a figure of remarkable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.
[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]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
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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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.
[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]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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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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"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.
[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]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
