PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
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.
Olivia Laing writes so well and engagingly -- Philippa Perry 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 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 <i>You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine</i> 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 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 <i>My Autobiography of Carson McCullers</i> 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 <i>The Fact of a Body</i> 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 <i>Gaga Feminism</i> Everybody is a riveting and fascinating innovative historiography of 20th century Euro-American radical thought . . . Brainy, open-hearted and bold -- Sarah Schulman, author of <i>Conflict Is Not Abuse </i>and <i>Let the Record Show</i> 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 <i>The Collected Schizophrenias</i>
