Out of Sheer Rage

"A potently distilled treatise on literature."—The New Yorker

"Smart and furious enough to justify its many detours. This book is a rant—not a meditation, never a meditation!—on pique and procrastination but primarily on that chronic, commonly occuring brand of perversity that defies psychiatric classification . . . [Dyer is] a comic antihero well-suited to our time."—Kelly Murphy Mason, The Washington Post

"In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it to . . . A wild book."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

"His brand of imaginative criticism illuminates a direction where literary criticism might go. If only we could have more fresh, insightful, energetic works such as Dyer's."—Jenifer Berman, Bomb

"An intriguing, magnetic, genre-rattling book."—Viola von Harrach, The Sunday Times

"There are well over 1,000 books on D.H. Lawrence, but this one has an unconventional angle. On the first page, one is disabused of the notion that this will be yet another critical analysis or biography, perhaps brilliant, perhaps jargon-ridden, but destined to join all the others. Instead of his planned academic 'Lawrence Book,' Dyer gives us a splendid study on procrastination, denial, rationalization, and writer's block. As he travels around Paris, Greece, Oaxaca, and other locales, he agonizes over such things as what books to bring along and which to leave behind; either way, they become excuses for not writing. There is the irony that the self-admittedly undisciplined Dyer did indeed manage to produce this book, even if not the learned tome he had intended. It deserves to be called his 'Lawrence Book,' and it's probably all the better for the manner in which it was written. Heartily recommended."—Janice E. Braun, Mills College, Oakland, California, Library Journal