This is not Dyer’s first attempt at this kind of book. It is, in other words, a secondary text that aspires to the stature of the primary. It is also an account of Stalker‘s production, a vicarious autobiography, a state-of-the-culture address, and a meditation on cinema and youth.

His new book, Zona, is ostensibly a summary of the film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, a director he calls “cinema’s great poet of stillness.” It is a testament to how high Dyer’s star has risen in the last few years, for while there are few people who could have written this book, there are fewer still who could have gotten it published.

This year’s National Book Critics’ Circle award for his collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, capped his rise from the occasional introducer of republished classics to a regular columnist in the New York Times Book Review, where he writes about more or less whatever he wants, more or less whenever he wants. Geoff Dyer has “broken” America, as they say in Britain. The Zone, still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, via

Stalker winds of time