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Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Chet Baker... Legendary musicians like suffering saints. A movie montage of life scenes. Whether you're a jazz fan or not, whether you've heard those songs or not, this book will make you want to listen to them-or listen to them again. And after you hear it, you'll want to look at those sentences again. Your heart will become soft and sensitive, like a poor little animal. Sometimes you will smile, sometimes you will want to cry inexplicably, sometimes you will suddenly remember something or someone from a long time ago, and sometimes you will stand up and go to the balcony to smoke a cigarette. And when you finish reading it, you know you will read it again, you will confidently (even proudly) recommend it to your friends, and you will keep it on your bookshelf forever, hoping that one day, when you leave this world, your children - your children's children - will read it too. Because, this is a little jazz bible.

Jeff Dyer has won the hearts of passionate fans on both sides of the Atlantic with his inventive romance novels and brilliant, uncategorizable nonfiction. At the same time, he also wrote some of the most witty and incisive commentary on a surprising range of subjects-music, literature, photography, and travel journalism-that became an irresistible form of self-reporting. Encyclopedia of the Human Condition is a collection of Jeff Dyer's 25 years of essays, commentary, and misadventures. In the book, he traces the shadow of Camus in Algeria and recalls the relief life in Briston in the 1980s; he reflects on the status of jazz, high fashion and contemporary art. No matter what he writes about, his answers always surprise the reader. For him, there is no disconnect between the critic's reflective work and the novelist's commitment to lived experience: they are mutually illuminating ways of sharpening our perceptions.