But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz

Author(s): Geoff Dyer

Music

Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonius Monk creating his own private language on the piano... In eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skilfully evokes the embattled lives of the players who shaped modern jazz. He draws on photos and anecdotes, but music is the driving force of But Beautiful and Dyer brings it to life in luminescent and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician's style.


Product Information

Winner of Somerset Maugham Award 1992. Shortlisted for John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize 1992.

Remarkable...there can be few books on jazz written with such tenderness and care. - Times Literary Supplement

Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as nine non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E.M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ's Writer of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. He lives in London.

General Fields

  • : 9780857864024
  • : Canongate Books
  • : Canongate Books
  • : 0.164
  • : April 2012
  • : .591 Inches X 5.079 Inches X 7.795 Inches
  • : United Kingdom
  • : July 2012
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Geoff Dyer
  • : Paperback
  • : 1
  • : English
  • : 823/.914
  • : 240