Funny reads for dark times

Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and other novels and 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. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.

At the Guardian, Dyer tagged a few titles (that you may not have read) for dark times, including:

Speaking of sex, drugs and California, Slow Days, Fast Company is the best book by Eve Babitz, who seemed to get high – often in bed – with practically everyone in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s. At one point in this collection she ends up in Palm Springs in the company of thinly altered versions of Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and his wife. The house where they’re staying is such a sleek celebration of modernism that the sliding doors leave one of the guests longing for doorknobs.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue