Olivia Laing

"You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. The Lonely City is a roving cultural history of urban loneliness, centered on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately involved with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if our sexuality or physical body is considered deviant or damaged? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens? Olivia Laing explores these questions by travelling deep into the work and lives of some of the century's most original artists, among them Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Edward Hopper, Henry Darger and Klaus Nomi. Part memoir, part biography, part dazzling work of cultural criticism, The Lonely City is not just a map, but a celebration of the state of loneliness. It's a voyage out to a strange and sometimes lovely island, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but visited by many - millions, say - of souls"--

Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

The Lonely City

In the age of Trump and Brexit, every crisis is instantly overridden by the next. The turbulent political weather of the twenty- first century generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Olivia Laing makes a brilliant, inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair. Art, she argues, changes how we see the world. It gives us X-ray vision. It reveals inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living. Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, and their role 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 Wolfgang Tillmans, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, Funny Weather celebrates art as an antidote to a terrifying political moment.

Art in an Emergency

Funny Weather

"Astute and consistently surprising critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing investigates the body and its discontents through the great freedom movements of the twentieth century.

A Book about Freedom

Everybody

"Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is."--The New Yorker

A Novel

Crudo

المدينة الوحيدة

A beautiful, lyrical book and a major new voice in British nature writing

A Journey Beneath the Surface

To the River

Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers.

Why Writers Drink

The Trip to Echo Spring

Named as one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2024 by The Observer, BBC, Irish Times, and The Guardian Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, "imaginative and empathetic critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise.

In Search of a Common Paradise

The Garden Against Time

“One of the finest writers of the new nonfiction” (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in our tumultuous modern era. 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.

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

Bisogna aver toccato l’abisso per saperlo raccontare. Per descrivere il vuoto avvolgente di una ferita che diventa uno stigma o l’angosciante cantilena che rimbomba in una casa di cui si è da sempre l’unico inquilino. Per restituire con la sola forza della voce certi angoli della metropoli, dove la suburra si fa rifugio e l’esclusione sollievo; per dire il loro improvviso, tragico trasformarsi da giardino delle delizie in inferno musicale.Olivia Laing rompe le pareti dell’ordinario e edifica all’interno della New York reale una seconda città, fatta di buio e silenzio: un’onirica capitale della solitudine, cresciuta nelle zone d’ombra lasciate dalle mille luci della Grande Mela e attraversata ogni giorno dalle storie di milioni di abitanti senza voce. Un luogo in cui coabitano le esperienze universali di isolamento e i traumi privati di personaggi come Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper e David Wojnarowicz; in cui ogni narrazione è allo stesso tempo evocazione e confessione.Quella tracciata da Olivia Laing è una visionaria mappa per immagini del labirinto dell’alienazione. Un flusso narrativo che investe le strade di New York e nel quale si mescolano la morte per Aids del cantante Klaus Nomi e l’infanzia dell’autrice, cresciuta da una madre omosessuale costretta a trasferirsi di continuo per sfuggire al pregiudizio; gli esperimenti sociali di Josh Harris che anticiparono Facebook e i silenzi dell’inserviente-artista Henry Darger che dipinse decine di quadri meravigliosi e inquietanti senza mai mostrarli a nessuno; l’inconsistente interconnessione umana dell’era digitale e l’arida gentrificazione di luoghi simbolici come Times Square.Con Città sola il Saggiatore presenta al pubblico italiano una delle autrici più originali del panorama internazionale contemporaneo. La sua è un’opera ambiziosa che, grazie a una scrittura sinestetica e conturbante, scava a fondo nell’anima di ognuno di noi, affrontando le umiliazioni, le paure e le ossessioni dell’essere soli. Con la speranza che rivelare significhi talvolta anche curare. Perché, come ricorda Olivia Laing, la solitudine è un posto affollato.

Città sola

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

O que significa a solidão? Como vivemos sem estar envolvidos intimamente com outro ser humano? Como nos conectamos a outras pessoas? A tecnologia nos aproxima ou nos aprisiona atrás de telas? Quando se mudou para Nova York, aos trinta e tantos anos, Olivia Laing se tornou uma habitante da solidão. Cada vez mais fascinada com essa experiência das mais vergonhosas, ela começou a explorar a cidade solitária por meio da arte. Movendo-se com fluidez entre obras e vidas – de Nightwalks de Edward Hopper às Time Capsules de Andy Warhol, da acumulação de Henry Darger ao ativismo de Aids de David Wojnarowicz –, Laing conduz uma investigação admirável, deslumbrante, sobre o que significa estar sozinho, iluminando não apenas as causas da solidão, mas também como se pode resistir a ela ou se reconciliar com ela. Humano, provocativo e profundamente comovente, A cidade solitária, uma inteligente mistura entre pesquisa bem fundamentada e depoimento pessoal da autora, reflete sobre os espaços entre pessoas e coisas que as unem, sobre sexualidade, mortalidade e as possibilidades mágicas da arte. É uma celebração a um estado estranho e encantador, isolado do continente maior da experiência humana, mas intrínseco ao próprio ato de estar vivo.

Aventuras na arte de estar sozinho

A cidade solitária

‘A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .’ 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. 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 is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

om konst, ensamhet och överlevnad

Den ensamma staden

Everybody. Un libro sui corpi e sulla libertà

Por que algumas das maiores obras da literatura foram escritas por homens imersos no alcoolismo? Em Viagem ao redor da garrafa – um ensaio sobre escritores e a bebida, a jornalista britânica Olivia Laing percorre longos caminhos – de Nova York a Nova Orleans, de Key West, na Flórida, até Saint Paul, em Minnesota, e a Port Angeles, na costa noroeste do Pacífico – e a vida de seis escritores americanos – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever e Raymond Carver –, para explorar a “trajetória sombria” e o papel que a bebida desempenhou na obra desses seis talentosos artistas. Alguns destes escritores se conheciam entre si: Hemingway e Fitzgerald, em dado momento, foram companheiros de copo; Carver e Cheever estreitaram sua amizade em razão do amor pela literatura e pela bebida quando estavam na Universidade de Iowa. Outros se admiravam a distância: Cheever nunca conheceu Williams, mas se deleitava com o homoerotismo explícito de suas peças, enquanto reprimia seu próprio desejo por outros homens. A triste inevitabilidade causada pelo álcool conecta a todos eles. Nas mãos de Laing, todavia, esses homens, conhecidos por serem particularmente difíceis e ásperos, se tornam figuras humanas, demasiadamente humanas.

Olivia Laing

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