An Event with Geoff Dyer in New York
On Friday March 9th, John Jeremiah Sullivan and Geoff Dyer will be in conversation at 192 Books. Here’s Dyer from a recent interview in Bookforum:
Failure is quite interesting, and it’s something I have a certain amount of experience with. I wasn’t a failure in the way lots of people are failures—I could always get published, that was pretty straightforward. Literary failure is funny because it’s not like you get this massive slap in the face and become a figure of ridicule. It’s more that you do this thing, you write this book, and then this big thing is poised to happen on publication. And nothing happens. It’s just a weird non-event. The literary Richter scale doesn’t register any kind of tremor. That was happening to me for a very long while, and then I managed to persuade myself that these serial failures were perhaps a kind of liberation in that it meant I was free from any kind of pressure from publishers. The stakes were so low that it didn’t really make any kind of difference to anybody that I went from writing a novel to writing a book about the First World War.
You can RSVP to the event by calling (212) 255-4022
