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'Intensely moving, vital and artful' - Guardian 'A dizzying ride . . . both timely and beguiling' - Sunday Times At a moment in which basic rights are once again in danger, Olivia Laing conducts an ambitious investigation into the body and its discontents, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her own experiences in protest and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone...
'I couldn't put it down' – Sally Rooney, author of Normal People Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment – marriage. But it’s not only Kathy who is changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when it could all end at any moment? From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a politically-paralysed UK, Olivia Laing's first novel is a love letter, inspired by the life and work of Kathy Acker. It is a blistering rewire of the form and a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. '[Crudo] will blow you away' – Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize
Autumn Laing has long outlived the legendary circle of artists she cultivated in the 1930s. Now 'old and skeleton gaunt', she reflects on her tumultuous relationship with the abundantly talented Pat Donlon and the effect it had on her husband, on Pat's wife and the body of work which launched Pat's career. A brilliantly alive and insistently ene...
In this inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. 'Never has a publication been more timely' - Dazed 'A brave writer whose books open up fundamental questions about life and art’ - Telegraph Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, examining their roles in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We’re often told art can’t change anything. In Funny Weather, Laing argues that it can. It changes how we see the world, it exposes inequality, and it offers fertile new ways of living.
The warm, funny and entertaining memoir of much-loved TV personality and loveable posh boy, Jamie Laing. Funny, charming, and romantic to a fault, everyone loves Jamie Laing. The affectionate and exuberant blonde puppy dog has come a long way - and broken many hearts - since he first graced our screens in 2011 as the joker of the King's Road on Made in Chelsea. Ten years on, he became king of the ballroom making the final of Strictly Come Dancing. Now he's ready to spill the tea - and (McVitie's) biscuits - about life, love and everything in between. From his idyllic upbringing in the countryside to the grey walls of boarding school, Jamie has always had a knack for getting himself into trou...
DIVDIVA riotously funny saga of institutional insanity, based on the author’s association with the notorious psychiatrist R. D. Laing/divDIV Despite massive literary success, Sidney Bell feels perpetually unsatisfied and suffers unexplained physical ailments. Desperate to straighten out his twisted life, anxiety-ridden Sid seeks help from experimental psychiatrist Dr. Willie Last, whose therapeutic methods involve hallucinatory drugs such as LSD and trading places with his patients. After a tumultuous first trip, Sid ends up at Conolly House, a radical hospital for young schizophrenics where he serves as a “barefoot doctor.” From there, Sigal launches readers on a sardonic, rambling journey through a fantastic breed of insanity./divDIV With his freewheeling, ecstatic prose, Sigal spins a manic psychological quest into a telling portrait of a society in the grips of a turbulent decade. Zone of the Interior is a subversive and uproarious search for clarity and comfort in an increasingly mad world, grounded by an unforgettable narrator./divDIV/div/div
To the River is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One idyllic, midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked. Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape and how ghosts never quite leave the place they love.
Why were so many authors of the greatest works of literature consumed by alcoholism? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America, examining the links between creativity and drink in the overlapping work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. From Hemingway's Key West to Williams's New Orleans, Laing pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, and strips away the tangle of mythology to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE Chosen as 'BOOK OF THE YEAR' by Observer, Guardian, Telegraph, Irish Times, New Statesman, Times Literary Supplement, Herald When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving fluidly between the works and lives of some of the city's most compelling artists, Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed.