Everybody

Everybody
Olivia Laing
RRP:
NZ$ 49.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 39.99
Hardback
h234 x 153mm - 368pg
29 Apr 2021 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9781509857111
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
' Simply one of our most exciting writers' - Observer ' A free-wheeling and joyful exploration of the works and lives of a range of artists and thinkers who brought libidinal and creative energy together with spectacular results' - Jack Halberstam The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. At a moment in which basic rights are once again imperilled, 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 alternative medicine, and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, she 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. Everybody is an examination of 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' - Telegraph
This is an astonishing project, written with equal parts stirring passion and capable intellect. Laing puts into words experiences I had never before seen in print, and the world is better for it. I love this book -- Esme Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias Everybody is a riveting and fascinating innovative historiography of 20th century Euro-American radical thought . . . Brainy, open-hearted and bold -- Sarah Schulman, author of Conflict Is Not Abuse and Let the Record Show A free-wheeling and joyful exploration . . . Laing' s particular gift lies in her unique ability to line up unlikely juxtapositions-of artists, ideas and works-and then draw clear and illuminating insights from such constellations. What her earlier work did for loneliness, this book does for liberation -- Jack Halberstam, author of Gaga Feminism Reading Everybody felt like hanging out with my absolute smartest friend having, somehow, the precise conversation I need to have in this historical moment. Olivia Laing' s mind is a thrill to watch . . . Rare is the book that makes you feel more alive just in reading it, but Everybody does just that -- Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body A provocative inquiry into the body' s power and vulnerability . . . casting fresh light on the unending struggles for freedom and autonomy -- Jenn Shapland, author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Olivia Laing has a genius for juxtaposing ideas and lives - of artists, writers, thinkers, her own too - so that they illuminate each other in fresh, sometimes startling ways. This new book is a triumph. It bristles with energy and understanding as it charts the body' s pleasures and pains, its fragilities, and endurance in the long 20th century. Above all, through illness, sex, the markers of gender and race, it tangles with the ways in which the body is always enmeshed with mind and psyche, society and politics. This really is a book for everybody. -- Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad Through [Laing' s] incisive lens, the body-that knot of mind, matter, culture, and society that we dwell inescapably within-becomes almost impossibly fascinating -- Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine In this brilliant and curiously gentle book, Olivia Laing tells of the brave people of the twentieth century who fought for sexual freedom, while also telling her own story of learning to inhabit one particular body. At a time in which all of our bodies have made us so strangely isolated and dangerous to each other, Everybody is especially resonant; and shows us just how important it is to explore our sexual identity in order to know who we really are -- Julia Blackburn, author of Time Songs Olivia Laing writes so well and engagingly -- Philippa Perry, author of How to Stay Sane Laing is radically empathetic, a writer-activist * Vulture * Andrea Dworkin, Sontag, Malcolm X, Freud - they speak to us and come alive again, but we aren' t asked to decide if they are good or bad; we can listen to their thoughts and ideas. It' s a revelation in an age when we seem endlessly to judge and condemn our artists and thinkers -- Chantal Joffe * Guardian * A new book by Olivia Laing is always cause for celebration and Everybody: A Book About Freedom is no exception * Frieze * Impassioned and provocative . . . This lucid foray into some of life' s deepest questions astonishes * Publishers Weekly, starred review *
Olivia Laing is the author of three acclaimed works of non-fiction, To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City, which has been translated into seventeen languages and sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. She' s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Laing writes on art and culture for many publications, including the Guardian, New York Times and frieze. Her collected writing on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, was published in 2020. She lives in Suffolk.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781509857111
Published: 29 Apr 2021
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Picador
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Format: Hardback
Height: 234mm
Width: 153mm
Pages: 368

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