One of my favourite of all contemporary writers.
- Alain de Botton,
Reading Dyer is akin to the sudden elation and optimism you feel when you make a new friend, someone as silly as you but cleverer too, in whose company you know you will travel through life more vagrantly, intensely, joyfully.
* Daily Telegraph *
There is no contemporary writer I admire more than Dyer, and in no book of his does he address his animating idea - The Only Way Not to Waste Time Is to Waste It - more overtly, urgently, emphatically and eloquently.
- David Shields, author of REALITY HUNGER,
Few books about film feel like watching a film, but this one does. We sit with Dyer as he writes about <i>Stalker</i>; he captures its mystery and burnish, he prises it open and gets its glum majesty. As a result of this book, I know the film better, and care about Tarkovsky even more.
- Mark Cousins, author of THE STORY OF FILM,
I loved this book. How can it possibly work - a book describing a film, more or less shot by shot? But it triumphantly does - i actually felt suspense, and revelation. And i'd never laugh at <i>Stalker</i>, but i did laugh all the way through this.
- Tessa Hadley, author of THE LONDON TRAIN,
A restless polymath and an irresistibly funny storyteller, he is adept at fiction, essay and reportage, but happiest when twisting all three into something entirely his own.
* New Yorker *
A true original . . . [Dyer] never ceases to surprise, disturb and delight.
- William Boyd,
A national treasure.
- Zadie Smith,
Perennially readable and wonderfully difficult to second-guess
* Bookseller *
Zona is penned with great linguistic flair, in a non-academic, conversational tone... It turns Zona from film criticism into a stranger, more amusing study and the section on why their journey is like the journey of writing a book is both intellectually neat and rather touching.
* Independent on Sunday *