Olivia Laing

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....

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.

In the age of Trump and Brexit, every crisis is instantly overridden by the next. The turbulent political weather generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Laing makes an inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair....

Olivia Laing's widely acclaimed account of why some of the best literature has been created by writers in the grip of alcoholism....

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?

An expertly crafted work of reportage, memoir, and biography on the subject of loneliness told through the lives of six iconic artists....

Over 60 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....

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....

Embodiment is not an easy business. From violence to illness, sexuality to racism, the fact of a body can be impossibly hard to inhabit. Olivia Laing draws on her own background in protest and alternative medicine to investigate the reasons why....

From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her 40s trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war....

Humane and deeply moving, The Lonely City is about the spaces between people and the things that draw them together, about sexuality, mortality and the magical possibilities of art....

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 21st century....

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens.

Humano, provocativo y conmovedor, este audiolibro nos habla sobre los espacios que unen a las personas y las cosas, acerca de la sexualidad, la mortalidad y las posibilidades mágicas del arte....

Bisogna aver toccato l'abisso per saperlo raccontare. Per descrivere il vuoto avvolgente di una ferita che diventa uno stigma...

Humano, provocativo y conmovedor, este audiolibro nos habla sobre los espacios que unen a las personas y las cosas, acerca de la sexualidad, la mortalidad y las posibilidades mágicas del arte....

Un relato bello y exigente de los abundantes placeres y posibilidades de los jardines como lugares de encuentro y descubrimiento.Inspirándose en la...

Cea mai cunoscută carte a Oliviei Laing, Orașul solitar este un text radiant despre singurătate, mecanismele care o provoacă și despre cum ne putem ...

Kathy scrive. Kathy prende il sole a bordo piscina in un resort della Toscana, si ubriaca di porto, frequenta le mostre più in voga di Londra...

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 21st century....