Geoff Dyer is often described as an “uncategorizable” writer (I am among the offenders) because of his hostility to a well-policed border between fiction and nonfiction. His travel essays have the feel of short stories, and his “proper” novels feature extended riffs that are criticism in disguise. (As he put it in the introduction to Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, “Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head.”)

I first met Dyer in 1996, after I acquired his book about jazz, But Beautiful, for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where I was a young editor. The first few times we saw each other, I think we mostly argued about movies. He had atrocious taste. “Strange Days is a masterpiece.” Or “Gummo is the best American film of the past twenty years.” But part of the fun of knowing—or reading—him is sparring with a voracious consumer of culture. He has written passionately—and always wittily—about books, photography, music of all kinds. In his latest book, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (just published by Pantheon), Dyer dons a metaphorical head-lamp to mine the ore of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

This interview was assembled from two conversations we recorded while Dyer was in San Francisco to promote Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, which I had edited for Graywolf Press, as well as a number of follow-up emails.

—Ethan Nosowsky

THE BELIEVER: Should we start at the beginning—or at least our beginning—with the American publication of But Beautiful?

GEOFF DYER: We need to go further back, to when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I published my first book, the study of John Berger [Ways of Telling], in 1986. I was commissioned to write this book and got a fat advance of one thousand pounds. I wrote it while living on the dole, because of course it took a year to write, and there’s no way that I could live on that. But this was really a prophetic book as well—prophetic, not pathetic—in that a week before I was due to get finished copies, the publisher, Pluto Press, went bankrupt. That was a devastating blow for me, because although I’ve now published a lot of books, that was the first book, the thing that changes you from being a would-be writer to having a book out with your name on it.

I don’t want this interview to be a tale of woe, but we can move on from that...