Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This is a collection of portraits of a shepherd, a farmer, a painter and blind man, a sylph of Byzantine arrogance and a vagabond cyclist with primroses growing in her basket. The backgrounds range from Prague, Paris, Athens, Lahore and countrysides and mountainscapes.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Have you ever looked at a photograph and wondered about the lives of the people captured in the camera's lens? Berger, noted art critic and Booker Prize-winning author of To the Wedding (LJ 5/1/95), gives the reader just this kind of glimpse in his new collection of stories. In "A Man Begging in the Metro" he writes, "Photography... is a spontaneous impulse which comes from perpetually looking, and which seizes the instant and its eternity." The characters in each of his vignettes seems to have full and rich lives outside and beyond the confines of their stories, and Berger has given us just a taste of them. Few of the stories are conventionally plot-driven. Instead, they read like meditations on the juxtaposition of life and art. For literary collections.‘Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Idaho Lib., Moscow (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Taking on the themes of art, friendship and time's passage, Berger (To the Wedding) fashions brief shorts that subtly replicate the photograph's ability to preserve a transient moment. Berger's subjects include his familiar Parisian artists and French peasants, but there are unexpected detours‘e.g., into Paul Klee's art ("Sheets of Paper Laid on the Grass") or the communiqués of Subcommandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista revolt in the Mexican state of Chiapas ("Subcommandante Insurgente"). Most of these spare stories revolve around a single, central detail or scene: deceptive small talk on a bus to Derry ("Passenger to Omagh") or a difficult calving on New Year's Day ("Two Men Beside a Cow's Head"). Only rarely does Berger's imagination fail to penetrate his subject's surface, as in his rhetorically sketched newswire image of a Russian girl fighting in the 1993 attempted parliamentary putsch ("A Young Woman Wearing a Chapka"). At his best, as in his meditations on Simone Weil's writing table ("A Girl Like Antigone") or his drawing of a young Ukranian pianist ("A Young Woman with Hand to Her Chin"), Berger captures all at once the facets of an object, a moment and a person. "Nothing should be lost or wasted," Berger writes in a eulogy for a villager, a claim that could stand as the epigraph to a book in which he frequently manages, through a few simple facts and words, to suggest a life. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

Featherlight touches and resonant phrasing have been Berger's stock in trade through his extensive career as novelist and critic (To the Wedding, 1995, etc.). This collection of short fictions (many, apparently, drawing heavily on the particulars of Berger's long life) is no exception, though these vignettes are colored with a pervasive melancholy that works as often to their detriment as to their advantage. ``Sometimes it seems that, like an ancient Greek, I write mostly about the dead and earth.'' This sentiment, which begins ``A Friend Talking,'' a short, poignant piece on the death of an artist in Paris, typifies the air of bittersweet remembrance cloaking the book as a whole. Another friend, a survivor of the Gulag living outside of Paris in a Le Corbusier house, is being forced in old age to leave the home where his mother waited for 14 years for him to return from Siberia (``A House Designed by Le Corbusier''). A visit with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson triggers a wide- ranging conversation on art and images (``A Man Begging in the Métro''), while a visit in high summer to an artist living in Galicia (``Sheets of Paper Laid on the Grass'') involves looking at her primordial mollusc-inspired drawings, which invoke the work of Paul Klee. Other visits range from a trip to the Italian hills to see the crumbling ancestral home outside of which a friend's mother has recently planted a single jasmine, to yet more visits with painters, usually friends of long acquaintance. The cumulative effect of these special events, both sad and satisfying, is a gentle yet persistent distancing, a refinement of memory's moments into acts of archetypal sharing. With so clear a focus on death and detachment, it's hard not to see this collection as a sort of letting go--though not, one hopes, a cap on the career of so keen an observer and grandly gifted a writer.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

John Peter Berger was born in London, England on November 5, 1926. After serving in the British Army from 1944 to 1946, he enrolled in the Chelsea School of Art. He began his career as a painter and exhibited work at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s. He then worked as an art critic for The New Statesman for a decade.

He wrote fiction and nonfiction including several volumes of art criticism. His novels include A Painter of Our Time, From A to X, and G., which won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize in 1972. His other works include an essay collection entitled Permanent Red, Into Their Labors, and a book and television series entitled Ways of Seeing.

In the 1970s, he collaborated with the director Alain Tanner on three films. He wrote or co-wrote La Salamandre, The Middle of the World, and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. He died on January 1, 2017 at the age of 90.

(Bowker Author Biography)