Geoff Dyer on Death and Bob Dylan

In this episode, we spoke to the inimitable Geoff Dyer, author of books including Out of Sheer Rage, Zona, But Beautiful, The Ongoing Moment, and Broadsword Calling Danny Boy.

His new book, The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings, was published by Canongate earlier this month. Ingeniously structured – separated into three sections of sixty chapters, with its 86,400 words representing each second in a day – it is both witty and wise, and examines the late careers of artists as varied as J. M. W. Turner, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Bob Dylan and the eponymous Federer on its way to asking the question: "Could it be that our deepest desire is for it all to be over?"

Less elaborately structured, our freestyle conversation with Geoff is one we reluctantly ended with a reference to a shampoo scam. Before that? The difficulty of retaining what you read; Geoff’s capacity for building atomic weaponry; the case for reading Middlemarch; artist James Turrell's pharaonic Roden Crater project in the Arizona desert; and the genius of Larry McMurtry – all in a mere 2,844 seconds.

For initiates and the uninitiated alike, our conversation is a perfect window into the boundlessly curious and original mind of one of Britain's greatest wits.