Märkligt väder : konst i kristid
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 te...
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result
Crudo
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
The Silver Book
Art, power, desire, and illusion collide in a hypnotic new novel from Olivia Laing, set in the months leading up to the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975. It is September 1974. Two men meet in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realizing the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini's Casanova. A young apprentice is just what he needs. He sweeps Nicholas to Rome and introduces him to the looking-glass world of Cinecitt , the studio where Casanova's Venice will be ingeniously assembled. In the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Sal , Pasolini's horrifying fable of fascism. But Nicholas has a secret, and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amid the rising tensions of Italy's Years of Lead, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he doesn't intend.
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result
The Lonely City
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism #1 Book of the Year from Brain Pickings Named a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit Hub A dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring. When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by the most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving from Edward Hopper's Nighthawks to Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, from Henry Darger's hoarding to David Wojnarowicz's AIDS activism, 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. Humane, provocative, and moving, The Lonely
Crudo
'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 l...
Garden Against Time
A 'Book of the Year' for The Independent, The Finanical Times, The Irish Times and The New Yorker Shortlisted for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 'What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but...
Funny Weather - Art in an Emergency
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.
To the River
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 ...
Trip to Echo Spring
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...
Trip to Echo Spring
A New York Times Notable Book of 2014 A Time Magazine Notable Book of 2014 Olivia Laing's widely acclaimed account of how writers in the grip of alcoholism created some of the greatest works of American literature In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America, examining the links between creativity and alcohol in the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. Captivating and highly original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.
Lonely City
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 inha...
Silver Book
SHORTLISTED FOR BLACKWELL'S BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025 'It is dangerous to want someone this much. He has always known it, from the very first night.' It is September 1974. Two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked fl...
Inpå Bara Kroppen - En Bok Om Frihet
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).
Funny Weather
Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, examining its role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keefe, 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. Laing argues that it can. It changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.
Everybody
The author of The Lonely City takes readers on an ambitious investigation into the body in the twentieth century, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart an electrifying course through the great freedom movements of the era, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil-rights movement.
Everybody
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, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X. 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.
The Garden Against Time
From one of our most original contemporary voices, The Garden Against Time is an inventive and deeply felt exploration of the long dream of a shared Eden, a common paradise.