On Wednesday, October 23, acclaimed author Geoff Dyer will speak with professor of English studies, Amitava Kumar, on the Hellen D. Lockwood Chair in the Sanders Classroom Building Spitzer Auditorium. Dyer will discuss works that teeter between the thresholds of novels and essays—works that could be easily classified within both genres.

Dyer's approach to writing persists in the contemporary world as they embody a 21st-century style. Not only do his texts forego templates for a standard genre, but they also discuss a plethora of subjects in a poignant and analytical fashion. From jazz to photography and from D. H. Lawrence to drugs, Dyers write about it all. Novelist Jonathan Lethem has even called Dyer the “leading master of the indefinable memoir-essay-perambulation on diverse topics."

As the author of four novels, Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, two collections of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room, and five genre-defying titles, But Beautiful, The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, and The Ongoing Moment, Dyer is more than qualified to speak on the interchangeability of essays and novels. Most recently, Dyer has written the book Zona: a Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, a piece discussing the groundbreaking film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Dyer has was multiple awards for writing, including the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, GQ Writer of the Year Award, and the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

The event will take place at 6:30pm on October 23 in the Sanders Classroom Building Spitzer Auditorium at Vassar College and will be open to the public. (845) 437-5370. Vassar.edu.