The Last Days of Roger Federer

One of Esquire¿s best books of spring 2022

An extended meditation on late style and last works from ¿one of our greatest living critics¿ (Kathryn Schulz, New York).

How and when do artists and athletes know that their careers are coming to an end? What if the end comes early in a writer¿s life? How to keep going even as the ability to do so diminishes? In this ingeniously structured investigation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, musicians, and sports stars who¿ve mattered to him throughout his life. With playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he considers Friedrich Nietzsche¿s breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan¿s reinventions of old songs, J.M.W. Turner¿s proto-abstract paintings of blazing light, Jean Rhys¿s late-life resurgence, and John Coltrane¿s final works.

Ranging from Burning Man to Beethoven, from Eve Babitz to William Basinski, and from Annie D