Geoff Dyer, Here and There

_Rebecca Mead will be chatting with Geoff Dyer at The New Yorker Festival on Saturday, October 1st, at 1 P.M. Visit the Festival Web site for information on tickets, venues, and to view the full schedule of events

[#image: /photos/590953d26552fa0be682c837]The polite thing to say about Geoff Dyer would be that I can’t put his books down, but in fact the opposite is true: whenever I am reading one, the thing I want to do most is to put it down and start writing. This is a compliment of the highest order: Dyer has such a perfect mastery of tone, such a light touch, such a felicitous turn of phrase—on just about every page, there’s a sentence that makes me think, God, I wish I’d written that—that he makes me want to go and do it for myself. I’ll be interviewing Geoff—as I hope I’ll be able to start calling him once we’ve been introduced—at the Festival, and I’m looking forward to asking him about the pleasures (or otherwise) of writing; about whether hotel rooms really are synonymous with sex; and about lying on the page.