Olivia Laing Livres

Acclaimed author Olivia Laing examines the life of renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart an electrifying course through the great freedom movements of the twentieth century.

Olivia Laing, prize-winning, bestselling author of The Lonely City and Crudo, returns with a career-spanning collection of essays on the power of art in times of crisis.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 GORDON BURN PRIZECHOSEN AS 'BOOK OF THE YEAR' BYObserverGuardianTelegraphIrish TimesNew StatesmanTimes Literary SupplementHeraldWhen Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving fluidly between the works and lives of some of the city's most compelling artists, 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.

To the River is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love. Along the way, Laing explores the roles rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature and mythology alike. To the River excavates all sorts of stories from the Ouse's marshy banks, from the brutal Barons' War of the thirteenth century to the 'Dinosaur Hunters', the nineteenth-century amateur naturalists who first cracked the fossil code. Central among these ghosts is, of course, Virginia Woolf herself: her life, her writing and her watery death. Woolf is the most constant companion on Laing's journey, and To the River can be read in part as a biography of this extraordinary English writer, refracted back through the river she loved. But other writers float through these pages too - among them Iris Murdoch, Shakespeare, Homer and Kenneth Grahame, author of the riverside classic The Wind in the Willows. The result is a wonderfully discursive read - which interweaves biography, history, nature writing and memoir, driven by Laing's deep understanding of science and cultural history. It's a beautiful, lyrical work that marks the arrival of a major new writer.

Originally published: Great Britain: Canongate Books, 2013.

A brilliant, funny, and emphatically raw novel of love on the brink of the apocalypse, from the acclaimed author of The Lonely City . "She had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as invasion, as the prelude to loss and pain, she really didn’t have a clue." 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. From a Tuscan hotel for the superrich to a Brexit-paralyzed United Kingdom, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties adjusting to the idea of a lifelong commitment. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever-closer to nuclear war. How do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all? 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 near.

The Garden Against Time is the No.1 Sunday Times bestseller from acclaimed writer Olivia Laing; a passionate, epic exploration of the power and possibilities of gardens. 'What a wonderful book this is' - Nigel Slater When Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants, the work drew them into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between the real and the imagined, from Milton's Paradise Lost to 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 can also be a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams, from the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the vision of a common Eden cultivated 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 radical change. 'This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained' - Philip Hoare 'Every generation gets one perfect book about gardens and this is ours' - Julia Bell 'Prepare yourself to be enchanted' - Jilly Cooper 'The most magical writing' - Jeremy Lee 'I felt doubly alive after reading it' - Celia Paul 'Quite literally unputdownable' - Jinny Blom 'A book for thinking gardeners everywhere' - Mary Keen

O umení byť sám. Keď sa Olivia Laing presťahovala do New Yorku, ocitla sa v priestore osamelosti. Tejto zahanbujúcej skúsenosti sa spoločnosť vyhýba ako moru, ale ju začala fascinovať a rozhodla sa „mesto osamelosti“ skúmať prostredníctvom výtvarného umenia. Vo svojej knihe sa prechádza New Yorkom, dielami a životmi Edwarda Hoppera, Andyho Warhola, Davida Wojnarowicza či Henryho Dargera a poskytuje živý obraz toho, čo znamená byť sám a osamelý. Neskúma len príčiny tohto stavu a jeho prejavy, ale aj spôsob, ako mu vzdorovať a ako sa z osamelosti vymaniť.

Wie Geschichte sich in eine Landschaft einschreibt – und wie Geister nie von den Orten verschwinden, die sie lieben. Über sechzig Jahre nachdem Virginia Woolf in der Ouse ertrunken ist, macht Olivia Laing sich an einem hellen Mittsommermorgen auf den Weg durch Südengland, um dem Lauf des magischen Flusses von der Quelle bis zur Mündung zu folgen. In von Kreidefelsen milchig-grün gefärbten Windungen, an Ufern auf dem Weg Richtung Meer sucht sie nach den Geheimnissen, die Flüsse tragen, verbergen, preisgeben. Herauskommt eine große, kluge und poetische Erzählung davon, wie Geschichte sich in eine Landschaft einschreibt – und davon, wie Geister nie von den Orten verschwinden, die sie lieben.

В тридцать с лишним лет переехав в Нью-Йорк по причине романтических отношений, Оливия Лэнг в итоге оказалась одна в огромном чужом городе. Этот наипостыднейший жизненный опыт завораживал ее всё сильнее, и она принялась исследовать одинокий город через искусство. Разбирая случаи Эдварда Хоппера, Энди Уорхола, Клауса Номи, Генри Дарджера и Дэвида Войнаровича, прославленная эссеистка и критик изучает упражнения в искусстве одиночества, разбирает его образы и социально-психологическую природу отчуждения. Человечный, дерзкий и глубоко проникновенный «Одинокий город» — книга о пространствах между людьми, о вещах, которые соединяют людей, о сексуальности, нравственности и чудодейственных возможностях искусства. Это исследование неведомого и чарующего состояния, оторванного от обширного материка человеческого жизненного опыта, но глубинно присущего жизни как таковой. Обжигающе проницательная и глубоко человечная книга. Лэнг – талантливый биограф, мемуарист и критик. Бесстрашно исследуя истоки одиночества и его сложные, но плодотворные отношения с искусством, «Одинокий город» становится пронзительным высказыванием о нашем мире. Во время ее чтения мое сердце наполнилось болью, но и надеждой. Хелен Макдональд , автор книги «Я – значит ястреб» Прекрасная книга-мозаика. Ханья Янагихара, The New Yorker Один из лучших авторов новой волны non-fiction. . . неотразимый и оригинальный. Harper’s Bazaar