In Geoff Dyer's deft hands, what seems like an abstract idea — the search for the essence of experience — becomes an opportunity for storytelling: for a bracing, riotous, and addictive (to writer and reader) chronicling of anticipation and expectation, of the ways in which the inevitable disparity between the two helps us find meaning in what we do and what we don't. Dyer travels around the globe — from New Orleans to Cambodia, Thailand, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Nevada's Black Rock Desert — and his mind is brimming with impressions, ideas, and circuitous considerations. In every new place, the imperfections of reality — mice in the hotel, the heat in the jungle temple, gale force winds in the city, the desire to be somewhere else even while here seems fine — compel him to take his own measure from the inside out and become a perfect reflection of his own decline.

Shrewd and truly unique in thought and voice, Dyer is the perfect guide to, as he puts it, "the whole self-journey thing."

"I have to say I was disappointed. Disappointed because this book was so funny, so effortlessly readable, so clear and wonderful that it meant that the brilliance of Out of Sheer Rage was not PURE DUMB LUCK." Steve Martin

"An irresistibly funny storyteller, [Dyer] is adept at fiction, essay, and reportage, but happiest when twisting all three into something entirely his own." The New Yorker

"Geoff Dyer is the British anti-snob whose travel writing combines book-learning with withering self-appraisal and a great sense of the comic. He is also probably the only living writer engaged in a spiritual journey who would never proclaim it." Ted Conover

"What is the proper way to describe Geoff Dyer? Not deeply companionable, not viciously funny, not shockingly original, not effortlessly hip, not naively romantic, not wryly analytic, not endearingly foolish, not engagingly clever, but, perhaps, some as-yet-uninvented phrase which implies all these things at once." Wendy Lesser, author of Nothing Remains the Same

"Although every section has at least a moment or two of arresting insight, two rise above the rest. One is the title piece, a beautifully evoked account of a brief affair, feather-wispy and intensely erotic, on a Thailand beach. The other is a splendidly long dead summer in Rome, where the city's suspended rhythm matches his own aimlessness." Richard Eder, New York Times

Geoff Dyer is the author of three novels: The Color of Memory, The Search, and Paris Trance; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; and three genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of the 1972 Somerset Maugham Prize), The Missing of the Somme, and Out of Sheer Rage (a National Book Critics Circle finalist). He lives in London, where he spends much of his time wishing he lived in San Francisco.