Olivia Laing

'Intensely moving, vital and artful' - Guardian'A dizzying ride . . . both timely and beguiling' - Sunday TimesFrom the award-winning author of Crudo, this is an exhilarating and eminently readable study of the long struggle for bodily freedom – from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement.Drawing on their 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, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X.At a time when basic rights are once again in danger, Everybody is a crucial examination of the forces arranged against freedom – and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize.'An ambitious, absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum' – Evening Standard'Sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin' – Financial Times

'Intensely moving, vital and artful' – Guardian'A dizzying ride . . . both timely and beguiling' – Sunday TimesFrom the award-winning author of Crudo, this is an exhilarating and eminently readable study of 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, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X.At a time when basic rights are once again in danger, Everybody is a crucial examination of the forces arranged against freedom – and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize.'An ambitious, absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum' – Evening Standard 'Sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin' – Financial Times

Keti - pisatelnitsa. Keti vykhodit zamuzh. Eto leto 2017 goda i mir rushitsja. Olivija Leng prevraschaet svoj pervyj roman v potrjasajuschij, smeshnoj i grubyj rasskaz o ljubvi vo vremja apokalipsisa. Slovno "Proschaj, Berlin" XXI veka, "Crudo" opisyvaet nespokojnoe leto 2017 goda v realnom vremeni s tochki zrenija bojaschejsja objazatelstv Keti Aker, a mozhet, i ne Keti Aker. V krajne dorogom toskanskom otele i paralizovannoj Breksitom Velikobritanii, pytajas privyknut k braku, Keti provodit pervoe leto svoego chetvertogo desjatka. No menjaetsja ne tolko ona. Politicheskij, sotsialnyj i prirodnyj landshafty - vsjo nakhoditsja v opasnosti. Rastet fashizm, pravda umerla, a planeta nakalena. Stoit li voobsche uchitsja ljubit, kogda konets sveta tak blizok? I kak tvorit, ne govorja uzhe o tom, kak zhit, esli odin zlobnyj tvit mozhet vsemu polozhit konets.Perevodchik: Kuznetsova Svetlana

It's the summer of 2017 and Kathy--who bears a distinct resemblance to punk novelist Kathy Acker-- is getting married. Meanwhile, fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever closer to nuclear war. In Crudo, her first work of fiction, Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel with a fierce, compassionate account of learning to love when the end of the world seems in sight.A New York Times Notable, Washington Post, NPR, Guardian, and Bustle Best Book of 2018"Breathless and gripping. . . . [Crudo] traps the first summer of Trump and Brexit like a fly in amber." -- NPR"A narrative written with immense vitality and, miraculously, the lightest of touches." -- Deborah Levy, Wall Street Journal"A single moment in modernity, deconstructed by the savagely entertaining, Ackerinspired voice of Laing." -- Paris Review Daily

A blisteringly funny and remarkably tender debut novel from Olivia Laing, one of the finest non-fiction writers of her generation.

"She had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as invasion, as the prelude to loss and pain, she really didn't have a clue." Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It's the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Fast-paced and frantic, Crudo unfolds in real time from the full-throttle perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker. From a Tuscan hotel for the superrich to a Brexit-paralyzed United Kingdom, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties adjusting to the idea of a lifelong commitment. But it's not only Kathy who's changing. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever-closer to nuclear war. How do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all? In Crudo, her first work of fiction, Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel with a fierce, compassionate account of learning to love when the end of the world seems near.

The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling 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, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X.Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

A new edition of the only story collection compiled by legendary writer, actress, ex-biker, and columnist Cookie Mueller, featuring additional writings. First published in 1991, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black was the only story collection that the legendary writer, actress, ex-biker, and columnist Cookie Mueller compiled in her lifetime. Featuring a new introduction by Olivia Laing and an afterword by the book's first editor, Chris Kraus, this new edition collects all of Mueller's fiction, together with her Details magazine columns (1982-1989) and other writings. The additional stories were discovered by Amy Scholder, who edited the anthology Ask Dr. Mueller for High Risk/Serpent's Tail books in 1996. As Scholder writes in her introduction, the new stories were "written around the same time she wrote the stories in Walking Through Clear Water, but for some reason Cookie decided not to include them. They are darker than most of her other stories; they are the quotidian Cookie, and that is why I especially love them." Mueller's life and work were celebrated in Chloe Griffith's 2014 oral biography Edgewise, bringing her work to a new generation of readers.

”Det här är en bok om kroppar i fara och kroppar som en kraft för förändring.” Så lyder första meningen i Olivia Laings bok om vad våra erfarenheter gör med våra kroppar och vad våra kroppar gör med våra erfarenheter. Men bokens perspektiv är betydligt vidare än vad som brukar vara fallet när kroppen kommer på tal. För kroppen ingår ju alltid i sammanhang av många olika slag: medicinska, psykologiska, sexuella, kulturella, politiska, ekonomiska … Och många har intresse av att kategorisera den, disciplinera den eller distansera sig från den. Laing synliggör de ofta motsägelsefulla tankemönster som finns på området och visar på våra möjligheter att göra oss fria från dem. Framställningens utgångspunkt och återkommande referens är psykoanalytikern och fritänkaren Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), som var den som myntade begreppet ”den sexuella revolutionen” och bland annat hävdade att fascism och sexualskräck har mycket med varandra att göra. Men Laing går samtidigt i dialog med en rad andra intellektuella och konstnärliga gestalter, från Angela Carter, Andrea Dworkin och Ana Mendieta till Marquis de Sade, Nina Simone och Susan Sontag. Och hon uppmärksammar i sammanhanget också hbtq-rörelsen, Black Lives Matter, flyktingkrisen och annat som direkt eller indirekt är kroppsanknutet. Kroppen står i förbindelse med allt. Brittiska Olivia Laing (född 1977) har publicerat journalistik, essäer i olika format och en roman och har blivit mer och mer uppmärksammad både hemmavid och internationellt. På svenska finns tidigare "Den ensamma staden" (2017) och "Märkligt väder" (2021).

"Novaja kniga Olivii Leng predstavljaet soboj avtorskij sbornik korotkikh tekstov, napisannykh v 2011-2019 godakh.Eti kolonki dlja gazet i zhurnalov, retsenzii na knigi i vystavki, stati o pisateljakh i khudozhnikakh, nostalgicheskie vospominanija i priznanija v ljubvi skladyvajutsja v proniknovennuju khroniku vstrech zhizni i iskusstva na fone trevozhnykh sobytij minuvshego desjatiletija."Perevodchik: Reshetova Natalja

In this remarkable, 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. Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, 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 that art can't change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.

The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling 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, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X.Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

'A brave writer whose books open up fundamental questions about life and art' – TelegraphIn this inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a vivid and politically-engaged case for the importance of art – especially in the turbulent weather of the twenty-first century.We are 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.Across a diverse selection of essays, Laing 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.Written with originality and compassion, Funny Weather is a celebration of art as a force of resistance and repair – and as an antidote to a frightening political moment.

I ett samtal som ingår i "Märkligt väder" framhåller Olivia Laing att hon aldrig vill hålla sig till en enda sak utan gillar att kunna röra sig fram och tillbaka mellan olika saker. Och om det är något som är påtagligt i texterna i den här volymen, så är det just rörligheten, viljan att vidga perspektiven, kliva rätt ut (eller rätt in) i något annat, något oväntat – oavsett om texterna handlar om konst, litteratur, musik, politik, sexualitet, miljöaktivism eller vad det nu kan vara. En av dem tar till exempel med läsaren till en trädgård, närmare bestämt den som filmaren Derek Jarman skapade på en blåsig udde och skrev en redan klassisk bok om. Laing visar att det finns ett tydligt samband mellan Jarmans högst personliga form av trädgårdsskötsel och den politiska och estetiska radikalitet som genomsyrar hans konstnärskap. Hon är bra på att urskilja sådant. David Bowie, Ali Smith, Marguerite Duras, Freddie Mercury, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chris Kraus och Georgia O’Keeffe är andra konstnärliga gränsöverskridare vi får bekanta oss med mellan pärmarna. Men här finns även texter som på ett mer vardagsförankrat vis vänder och vrider på de utmaningar människor står inför i en tid präglad av ojämlikhet, populism och tunnelseende. Utmaningar som inte verkar göra Laing dyster, snarare klarvaken och uppfinningsrik. "Märkligt väder" blir också på så vis en bok om motstånd och hopp. Olivia Laing, född 1977, har ett flertal böcker bakom sig. På svenska finns "Den ensamma staden. Om konst, ensamhet och överlevnad" (2017).

OLIVIA LAING'S WIDELY ACCLAIMED ACCOUNT OF WHY SOME OF THE BEST LITERATURE HAS BEEN CREATED BY WRITERS IN THE GRIP OF ALCOHOLISMIn The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often, they did their drinking together: Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafes of Paris in the 1920s; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973.Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever's New York to Williams' New Orleans, and from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery. Beautiful, captivating, and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.

OLIVIA LAING'S WIDELY ACCLAIMED ACCOUNT OF WHY SOME OF THE BEST LITERATURE HAS BEEN CREATED BY WRITERS IN THE GRIP OF ALCOHOLISMIn The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often, they did their drinking together: Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafes of Paris in the 1920s; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973.Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever's New York to Williams' New Orleans, and from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery. Beautiful, captivating, and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.

"Den ensamma staden" blev utnämnd till BOOK OF THE YEAR (2016) av Observer, Guardian, Telegraph, Irish Times, New Statesman och Times Literary Supplement. "Läs Olivia Laings stillsamt drabbande bok om ensamhet! Jag blev både sorgsen och stärkt" /Jonas Gardell "En skimrande juvel till bok." /Ulrika Stahre i Expressen "'Den ensamma staden' är inte en bok, den är en ny vän, vars umgänge gör, ja, livet lite mindre ensamt." /Martin Engberg i GP En oerhört intressant och oväntad läsning." /Yukiko Duke i Gomorron "Boken är både provocerande och lugnande, och fungerar som en sorts sekulär bön för ensamma själar" /The New York Times Book Review "Underbart ohämmad och konstant överraskande" /Guardian "En ny sorts litteratur ... Oavbrutet, tvångsmässigt fascinerande" /New Statesman "Laing dissekerar ett universellt tillstånd som ofta är svårt att relatera till" /Financial Times "En modig författare som tar sig an grundläggande frågor om livet och konsten" /Telegraph "Vackert, originellt och medkännande" /Independent "Du kan vara ensam var som helst, men den ensamhet du kan känna när du bor i en stad, omgiven av miljoner människor, har en särskild underton. Man skulle kunna tro att det här tillståndet var raka motsatsen till livet i en storstad, till den massiva närvaron av andra människor, men enbart fysisk närhet räcker inte för att skingra känslan av inre isolering. Det är möjligt, till och med lätt, att känna sig ensam och övergiven samtidigt som man lever sida vid sida med andra." När den engelska författaren och kritikern Olivia Laing drabbades av en förtärande ensamhet i New York efter att ett förhållande oväntat hade kraschat, vände hon sig till konsten för att fylla sina dagar och få lindring. Och med dess hjälp började hon utforska vad ensamheten kan göra med oss och vi med den. Resultatet blev den internationellt uppmärksammade essän "Den ensamma staden". Laing skriver om ensamheten hos Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, David Wojnarowicz och andra konstnärer – men också om sätt på vilka konsten och livet kan flätas in i varandra och skapa utrymme för mänskliga möten under omständigheter som kan verka allt annat än gynnsamma. Det är dessutom en bok om tillvaron i New York, om olika livsvärldar och livsmöjligheter bortom den snäva normaliteten, om aidsepidemin på åttiotalet och medmänsklighetens förutsättningar, om sexualitet, utsatthet, tillit. Det är en ljus bok, skriven nära ett stort mörker.

Over sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing set out one midsummer morning to walk its banks, from source to sea. Along the way, she explores the roles that rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology and folklore.Lyrical and stirring, To the River is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places 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.

Upon changing his religion, a young man is denounced as an apostate and flees his country hiding in the back of a freezer lorry… After years of travelling and losing almost everything – his country, his children, his wife, his farm – an Afghan man finds unexpected warmth and comfort in a stranger’s home... A student protester is forced to leave his homeland after a government crackdown, and spends the next 25 years in limbo, trapped in the UK asylum system... Modelled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the second volume of Refugee Tales sets out to communicate the experiences of those who, having sought asylum in the UK, find themselves indefinitely detained. Here, poets and novelists create a space in which the stories of those who have been detained can be safely heard, a space in which hospitality is the prevailing discourse and listening becomes an act of welcome.