John Berger Books In Order

Into Their Labours Books In Order

  1. Pig Earth (1979)
  2. Once in Europa (1987)
  3. Lilac and Flag (1990)

Novels

  1. The Foot of Clive (1962)
  2. Corker’s Freedom (1964)
  3. G. (1972)
  4. Keeping a Rendezvous (1991)
  5. To the Wedding (1995)
  6. Isabelle (1998)
  7. King (1999)
  8. Here Is Where We Meet (2005)
  9. From A to X (2008)

Collections

  1. Photocopies (1996)

Plays

  1. Jonah Who Will Be Twenty-Five in the Year 2000 (1983)
  2. A Question of Geography (1987)
  3. The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol (2003)

Non fiction

  1. A Painter of Our Time (1958)
  2. Permanent Red (1960)
  3. The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965)
  4. A Fortunate Man (1967)
  5. Art and Revolution (1969)
  6. Moment of Cubism and Other Essays (1969)
  7. Selected Essays and Articles (1972)
  8. Ways of Seeing (1972)
  9. A Seventh Man (1975)
  10. About Looking (1980)
  11. Another Way of Telling (1982)
  12. About Time (1985)
  13. The White Bird (1985)
  14. The Sense of Sight (1986)
  15. Goya’s Last Portrait (1989)
  16. Paul Hogarth (1989)
  17. Pequod (1990)
  18. At the Edge of the World (1999)
  19. The Shape of a Pocket (2001)
  20. Rays of the Rising Sun (2001)
  21. Selected Essays (2001)
  22. Titian (2003)
  23. Hold Everything Dear (2007)
  24. War With No End (2007)
  25. Why Look at Animals? (2009)
  26. Bento’s Sketchbook (2011)
  27. Understanding a Photograph (2013)
  28. Portraits (2015)
  29. Confabulations (2016)
  30. Landscapes (2016)
  31. Smoke (2017)
  32. Railtracks (2018)
  33. The Red Tenda of Bologna (2018)
  34. Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible (2020)

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John Berger Books Overview

Pig Earth

With this haunting first volume of his Into Their Labours trilogy, John Berger begins his chronicle of the eclipse of peasant cultures in the twentieth century. Set in a small village in the French Alps, Pig Earth relates the stories of skeptical, hard working men and fiercely independent women; of calves born and pigs slaughtered; of summer haymaking and long dark winters f rest; of a message of forgiveness from a dead father to his prodigal son; and of the marvelous Lucie Cabrol, exiled to a hut high in the mountains, but an inexorable part of the lives of men who have known her. Above all, this masterpiece of sensuous description and profound moral resonance is an act of reckoning that conveys the precise wealth and weight of a world we are losing.

Once in Europa

Berger’s modern classic updated with glorious photos. John Berger has spent a lifetime experimenting with new ways of storytelling, often using both words and images as in books such as Another Way of Telling and A Fortunate Man, where he worked with photographer Jean Mohr, and in his world renowned Ways of Seeing. Now, together with artist photographer Patricia MacDonald, the beautiful love story found in his earlier collection, Once in Europa, is retold, in an emotionally and visually stunning combination. Macdonald’s powerful images, made from the air and close to the ground, and containing many layers of meaning, create a landscape and a weather for this contemporary classic.

Lilac and Flag

In the mythic city of Troy, amidst the shanty towns, factories, opulent hotels, fading heritages and steadfast dreams, the children and grandchildren of rural peasants pursue meagre livings as best they can. And two young lovers embark upon a passionate journey of love and survival.

Corker’s Freedom

An exhilarating and engrossing novel about the elderly owner of an employment agency whose romantic yearnings and inarticulate dreams propel him into a world of fantasy. Corker’s Freedom displays the storytelling magic that is a hallmark of Berger’s acclaimed fiction.

G.

In this luminous novel winner of Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize John Berger relates the story of ‘G.,’ a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of this century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the Don Juan’s success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their moments with him. All of this Berger sets against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War, and the first flight across the Alps, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history’s private moments.

Keeping a Rendezvous

One of the world’s most influential art critics…
and one of the most original of contemporary thinkers…
Berger’s ability to see something clearly, with fresh surprise yet profound understanding, makes his writing singularly moving and informative.’ Washington Times

When he stands before Giorgione’s La Tempesta, John Berger sees not only the painting but our whole notion of time, sweeping us away from a lost Eden. A photograph of a gravely joyful crowd gathered on a Prague street in November 1989 provokes reflection on the meaning of democracy and the reunion of a people with long banished hopes and dreams.

With the luminous essays in Keeping a Rendezvous, we are given to see the world as Berger sees it to explore themes suggested by the work of Jackson Pollock or J. M. W. Turner, to contemplate the wonder of Paris. Rendezvous are manifold: between critic and art, artist and subject, subject and the unknown. But most significant are the rendezvous between author and reader, as we discover our perceptions informed by John Berger’s eloquence and courageous moral imagination.

To the Wedding

A blind Greek peddler tells the story of the wedding between a fellow peddler and his bride in a remarkable series of vivid and telling vignettes. As the book cinematically moves from one character’s perspective to another, events and characters move toward the convergence of the wedding and a haunting dance of love and death.

King

In this book you will be led to a place you haven’t been, from where few stories come. You will be led by King, a dog or is he a dog? to a wasteland beside the highway called Saint Val ry. Here, at the end of the twentieth century, among smashed trucks, old boilers, and broken washing machines, live Liberto, Malak, Jack, Corinna, Danny, Anna, Joachim, Saul, Alfonso, and Vico and Vica. Listen to King’s voice as he tells a different kind of story: twenty four hours pass and lives are lived. It is good to have survived another winter, for now it is spring, when the nights, though cold, are no longer harsh enough to kill. The wet season is over, and with it the hopelessness of damp. Today the sun will shine: of what else will the day be made?King is at once a furious homage to the homeless and a lyrical meditation on language and experience. The bitter yet celebratory prose speaks to us all.

Here Is Where We Meet

One of the most widely admired writers of our time returns us to the captivating play and narrative allure of his previous novels G. and To the Wedding among them with a shimmering fiction drawn from chapters of his own life. One hot afternoon in Lisbon, our narrator, John, finds his mother, who had died fifteen years earlier, seated on a park bench. The dead don t stay where they are buried, she tells him. And so begins a remarkable odyssey, told in simple yet gorgeous prose and with the openness to personal and political currents that has always marked John Berger’s work. Having promised his mother that he will henceforth pay close attention to the dead, John takes us to a woman s bed during the 1943 bombardment of London, to a Polish market where carrier pigeons are sold, to a Paleolithic cave, to the Ritz Hotel in Madrid. Along the way, we meet an English aristocrat who always drives barefoot, a pedophile schoolmaster, a Spanish sculptor who cheats at poker, and Rosa Luxemburg, among other long gone presences, and John lets us choose to love each of them as much as he still does. This is a unique literary journey in which a writer s life and work are inseparable: a fiction but not a conventional novel, a narration in the author s voice but not a memoir, a portrait that moves freely through time and space but never loses its foothold in the present, a confession that brings with it not regret but a rich deepening of sensual and emotional understanding.

From A to X

A beautifully imagined story of love and resistance, by one of the foremost novelists of our age.

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 town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But Suse is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity an intimate dance, a shared meal assume for A’ida a life affirming significance, acts of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them. From A to X is a powerful exploration of how humanity affirms itself in struggle: imagining a community which, besieged by economic and military imperialism, finds transcendent hope in the pain and fragility, vulnerability and sorrow of daily existence.

Photocopies

Berger presents a collection of moments, each supremely vivid, that together make up a frieze of human history at the end of the millennium as well as a subtle and affecting self portrait of their author. Using careful, intensely visual prose snapping frozen vignettes of life, these twenty nine ‘Photocopies‘ teach us about lying and self invention, dignity and tenderness, charity and courage. Overflowing with the sights, sounds, and smells of life, Photocopies is a masterpiece from one of the most important chroniclers of our time.

Jonah Who Will Be Twenty-Five in the Year 2000

screenplay, tr Michael Palmer

A Painter of Our Time

This visionary first novel by the Booker Prize winning author of To the Wedding and G. is at once a gripping intellectual and moral detective story and a book whose aesthetic insights make it a companion piece to John Berger’s great works of art criticism.

The Success and Failure of Picasso

At the height of his powers, Pablo Picasso was the artist as revolutionary, breaking through the niceties of form in order to mount a direct challenge to the values of his time. At the height of his fame, he was the artist as royalty: incalculably wealthy, universally idolized and wholly isolated. In this stunning critical as*sessment, John Berger one of this century’s most insightful cultural historians trains his penetrating gaze upon this most prodigious and enigmatic painter and on the Spanish landscape and very particular culture that shpaed his life and work. Writing with a novelist’s sensuous evocation of character and detail, and drawing on an erudition that embraces history, politics, and art, Berger follows Picasso from his childhood in Malaga to the Blue Period and Cubism, from the creation of Guernica to the pained etchings of his final years. He gives us the full measure of Picasso’s triumphs and an unsparing reckoning of their cost in exile, in loneliness, and in a desolation that drove him, in his last works, into an old man’s furious and desperate frenzy at the beauty of what he could no longer create.

A Fortunate Man

In this quietly revolutionary work of social observation and medical philosophy, Booker Prize winning writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr train their gaze on an English country doctor and find a universal man one who has taken it upon himself to recognize his patient’s humanity when illness and the fear of death have made them unrecognizable to themselves. In the impoverished rural community in which he works, John Sassall tend the maimed, the dying, and the lonely. He is not only the dispenser of cures but the repository of memories. And as Berger and Mohr follow Sassall about his rounds, they produce a book whose careful detail broadens into a meditation on the value we assign a human life. First published thirty years ago, A Fortunate Man remains moving and deeply relevant no other book has offered such a close and passionate investigation of the roles doctors play in their society.’In contemporary letters John Berger seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience.’ Susan Sontag

Art and Revolution

In this prescient and beautifully written book, John Berger examines the life and work of Ernst Neizvestny, a Russian sculptor whose exclusion from the ranks of officially approved Soviet artists left him laboring in enforced obscurity to realize his monumental and very public vision of art. But Berger’s impassioned account goes well beyond the specific dilemma of the pre glasnot Russian artist to illuminate the very meaning of revolutionary art. In his struggle against official orthodoxy which involved a face to face confrontation with Khruschev himself Neizvestny was fighting not for a merely personal or aesthetic vision, but for a recognition of the true social role of art. His sculptures earn a place in the world by reflecting the courage of a whole people, by commemorating, in an age of mass suffering, the resistance and endurance of millions. ‘Berger is probably our most perceptive commentator on art…
A civilized and stimulating companion no matter what subject happens to cross his mind.’ Philadelphia Inquirer

Ways of Seeing

How do we see the world around us? ‘The Penguin on Design’ series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.’ ‘But, there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.’ John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing‘ is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the London ‘Sunday Times’ critic commented: ‘This is an eye opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings…
he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.’ By now he has.

About Looking

here is great stillness in Berger’s prose. But after a few pages, his statements start to sing and go on singing.’ New RepublicAs a novelist, art critic, and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight whose work amounts to a subtle, powerful critique of the canons of our civilization. In About Looking he explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. How do the animals we look at in zoos remind us of a relationship between man and beast all but lost in the twentieth century? What is it About Looking at war photographs that doubles their already potent violence? How do the nudes of Rodin betray the threats to his authority and potency posed by clay and flesh? And how does solitude inform the art of Giacometti? In asking these and other questions, Berger quietly but fundamentally alters the vision of anyone who reads his work.’Instant readability…
Berger makes one see paintings as statements or questions in a living language.’ New Statesman

Another Way of Telling

‘There are no photographs which can be denied. All photographs have the status of fact. What is to be examined is in what way photography can and cannot give meaning to facts.’ With these words, two of our most thoughtful and eloquent interrogators of the visual offer a singular meditation on the ambiguities of what is seemingly our straightforward art form. As constructed by John Berger and the renowned Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, that theory includes images as well as words; not only analysis, but anecdote and memoir. Another Way of Telling explores the tension between the photographer and the photographed, between the picture and its viewers, between the filmed moment and the memories that it so resembles. Combining the moral vision of the critic and the pratical engagement of the photgrapher, Berger and Mohr have produced a work that expands the frontiers of criticism first charged by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag.

The Sense of Sight

With this provocative and infinitely moving collection of essays, a preeminent critic of our time responds to the profound questions posed by the visual world. For when John Berger writes about Cubism, he writes not only of Braque, L ger, Picasso, and Gris, but of that incredible moment early in this century when the world converged around a marvelouis sense of promise. When he looks at the Modigiliani, he sees a man’s infinite love revealed in the elongated lines of the painted figure. Ranging from the Renaissance to the conflagration of Hiroshima; from the Bosphorus to Manhattan; from the woodcarvers of a French village to Goya, D rer, and Van Gogh; and from private experiences of love and of loss to the major political upheavals of our time, The Sense of Sight encourages us to see with the same breadth, courage, and moral engagement that its author does.

Goya’s Last Portrait

Executed in a time of upheaval, Goya’s portraits of the aristocracy, and his other etchings and drawings form a devastating comment on the society in which he lived. The authors depict Goya, drawing on episodes of his life and the iconography of his art, responding to his theatrical style.

At the Edge of the World

Jean Mohr is a world renowned Swiss photographer who has travelled thoughout the world documenting the lives of the dispossessed, the marginalized and the overlooked. Three years ago his doctor told him he had to undergo a life or death operation. Surgery was performed successfully in a Swiss clinic perched on a hill overlooking a picturesque landscape. All went well and after a few days he was able to venture out and climb up to the summit of the hill. Having just come close to the very edge of his own existence the idea came to him to revisit the places that in the past had struck him as being on the edge or the end of the world, remote to common experience as well as in geographical location. At this time he felt the need to confront difficult and vital questions as to his identity, his work and his role in this world and gradually small fragments germinated which resulted in the visual and textual mosaic which forms The Edge of the World. This book is a r! ecord in words and photographs of Jean Mohr’s journeys to places such as Romania, Karachi, Manilla, Pireas, Algeria, Lapland and Nicaragua, amongst others. Mohr’s friend and co author John Berger contributes a text on the same theme. The writer and photographer have collaborated on seminal photographic and textual narratives such as A Fortunate Man 1967, A Seventh Man 1975 and Another Way of Telling 1982.

The Shape of a Pocket

The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the New World Economic Order. The people coming together are the reader, me, and those the essays are about Rembrandt, Paleolithic cave painters, a Romanian peasant, ancient Egyptians, an expert in the loneliness of a certain hotel bedroom, dogs at dusk, a man in a radio station. And unexpectedly, our exchanges strengthen each of us in our conviction that what is happening in the world today is wrong, and that what is often said about it is a lie. I ve never written a book with a greater sense of urgency.
John Berger

Rays of the Rising Sun

When the Japanese Empire went to war with the Allies in December 1941, it had already been fighting in China for 10 years. During that time it had conquered huge areas of China, and subjugated millions of people. The Japanese needed to control the Chinese population in these occupied territories, and for this reason they set up governments from amongst the leaders of the Chinese who were willing to co operate with them. These so called ‘puppet’ governments were designed to rule on behalf of the Japanese while firmly under their overall control. In turn, the puppet governments needed their own armed forces to help them maintain control over the populace and so they raised their own ‘independent’ armed forces. These puppet armies were large in number, reaching a total of well over 1 million before 1945. Although poorly armed and equipped, these forces had an influence on the Japanese war effort through sheer numbers. The Chinese puppet soldiers ranged from the well drilled and trained regular Army of the Last Emperor of China, Pu Yi, who ruled the newly formed state of Manchukuo, 1932 45, to the irregular Mongol cavalry who served alongside Japanese troops in the ‘secret war’ waged in the Mongolian hinterlands. The troops were dismissed as traitors by the Chinese fighting the Japanese, and they were equally despised by the Japanese themselves. The troops were motivated by a range of reasons, from simple survival to a loyalty to their commander. The fact that so many Chinese were willing to fight for the Japanese was embarrasing to all sides, and for this reason has been largely ignored in previous histories of the war in the East. In the first of a two volume series, Jowett and Berger tell the story of the Chinese who fought for the Japanese over a 14 year period. Well over a million pro Japanese troops were under arms in China and Manchukuo, with possibly two million at one time. There were 7 different ‘puppet’ governments in existence, 1931 45 The Manchukuo State possessed an Army, Navy and Air Force. The governments were given all the paraphenalia of independent states, including their own flags and insignia.

Selected Essays

The writing career of John Berger poet, storyteller, playwright, and essayist has yielded some of the most original and compelling examinations of art and life of the past half century. In this essential volume, Geoff Dyer has brought together a rich selection of many of Berger’s seminal essays. Berger s insights make it impossible to look at a painting, watch a film, or even visit a zoo in quite the same way again. The vast range of subjects he addresses, the lean beauty of his prose, and the keenness of his anger against injustice move us to view the world with a new lens of awareness. Whether he is discussing the singleminded intensity of Picasso s Guernica, the parallel violence and alienation in the art of Francis Bacon and Walt Disney, or the enigmatic silence of his own mother, what binds these pieces throughout is the depth and fury of Berger s passion, challenging us to participate, to protest, and above all, to see.

Hold Everything Dear

John Berger occupies a unique position in the international cultural landscape: artist, filmmaker, poet, philosopher, novelist, essayist, he is also a deeply thoughtful political activist. In Hold Everything Dear, he artistry and activism mesh in an attempt to make sense of the world as we have come to know it during the past six years.

Berger analyzes the nature of terrorism and the profound despair that gives rise to it. He writes about the homelessness of millions across the globe who have been forced by poverty and war into lives as refugees. He discusses Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Serbia, Bosnia, China, Indonesia anyplace the power of corporations, the military, or paramilitary elements is being exercised, depriving ordinary citizens of autonomy or livelihoods or the most basic of freedoms.

Singularly lucid and bold, Hold Everything Dear fully acknowledges the depth of suffering occurring around the world and suggests ideas and action that might finally help bring it to an end. From one of the most widely admired, articulate, and impassioned writers of our time, this is a powerful collections of essays that holds a starkly reflective mirror up to post 9/11 realities.

War With No End

John Berger, Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, Joe Sacco and others examine the consequences of the War on Terror. 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 together some of the finest contemporary writers, this wide ranging anthology, from reportage and faction to fiction, explores the impact of this ‘long war throughout the world, from Palestine to Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the curtailment of civil liberties and manipulation of public opinion. Published in conjunction with Stop the War coalition and United for Peace and Justice, War With No End provides an urgent, necessary reflection on the causes and consequences of the ideological War on Terror.

Why Look at Animals?

John Berger broke new ground with his penetrating writings on life, art and how we see the world around us. Here he explores how the ancient relationship between man and nature has been broken in the modern consumer age, with the animals that used to be at the centre of our existence now marginalized and reduced to spectacle. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Bento’s Sketchbook

The seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza generally known as Benedict or Bento de Spinoza spent the most intense years of his short life writing. A keen draughtsman, he also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes, but apparently didn’t find a sketchbook. Or, if they did, it was subsequently lost. For years, John Berger has imagined Bento’s Sketchbook being found, not knowing what he hoped to find in it, but wanting to reread his words while being able to look at the things Bento had seen with his own eyes. When one day a friend gave John a blank sketchbook he began to draw: not like a seventeenth century Dutch amateur, nor to try and illustrate Bento’s thoughts, but drawing, in Spinoza’s company, from life today, and telling stories and asking questions. A book of images and words, Bento’s Sketchbook is an exploration of the practice of drawing, about where and to what it leads. It is, too, a beautiful, clear sighted meditation on how we perceive, and seek to explain, our ever changing relationship with the world around us.

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