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Showing 1 - 17 of 17 matches in All Departments
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.
Allotments are sanctuaries for growing, often on the fringes of suburbia, where life is getting ever more stressful and expensive. Here, a simple urge to grow-your-own or become self-sufficient, brings us closer to a community of people, wildlife and plants that are often more diverse than the cities and towns that surround them. An allotment is a utopia. It is a green place where anyone can occupy a piece of land, and grow with freedom of expression. Allotmenteering started with The Diggers in seventeenth-century Surrey, in response to the Enclosure Acts which deprived ordinary people of access to land. But the idea spread, first across England and the British Isles, then through Europe and the world. 'The Allotment', originally published in 1988, is the classic study of allotments. Encompassing the oral recordings of plot-holders alongside descriptions of regional variations on the plot itself, such as pigeon-fancying, seed collecting or leek competitions, it looks at British society and history through the prism of allotments. With a new introduction by Olivia Laing, this is a story that is just as relevant today, and is essential for those interested in social history, land ownership and gardening in twenty-first century Britain.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE Chosen as 'BOOK OF THE YEAR' by Observer, Guardian, Telegraph, Irish Times, New Statesman, Times Literary Supplement, Herald When 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.
Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black is the only story collection from the legendary writer, actress, ex-biker and columnist Cookie Mueller, published in the UK for the first time. Mueller chronicles her high-risk, high-reward life in glorious technicolour, from becoming a part of John Waters' legendary acting troupe to becoming a mother, from describing the hedonism of 1980s New York to critiquing the government's dire response to the AIDS epidemic. Cookie's voice is fresh, wise, freewheeling and unafraid of darkness. Like a lysergic Nora Ephron, she is the candid flipside to the idealistic hippie dream. Whether good, bad or ugly, her stories are fiercely entertaining and reliably honest. Featuring a new introduction by Olivia Laing, this edition collects Mueller's stories, columns and writings, and presents a testament to a life lived courageously and well.
As Chosen By… is a photographic series by Kate Friend shot exclusively on medium format film. In these portraits, her ‘sitters’ are flowers or plants, each one selected by a recognisable public figure or creative who is then recast through their botanical alter ego. Friend’s approach to the making of this series is a rigorous one: a single flower and vessel, chosen by an individual, is shot in natural light at their home, studio or garden. Each photograph is as much a portrait of a place as it is a portrait of a person and a flower. The coloured background for each image is selected by Friend, with the choice driven both by the aesthetic of the chosen flower and by a deeper intuitive sense of her sitter’s character. Although the methodology is concise and consistent, the resulting variety of images is testament to the array of unique personalities included in the project. Lavishly illustrated throughout, including many behind-the-scenes images taken by Friend throughout her process, the book features an introduction by writer Olivia Laing and an in-depth essay by Garden Museum Director Christopher Woodward. Sitters include: Anjelica Huston, Sir Paul Smith, Kulapat Yantrasast, Piet Oudolf, Luciano Giubbilei, Ai Weiwei, Claudia Schiffer, Tom Stuart-Smith, Yinka Ilori, Simone Rocha, Tania Compton, Georgie Hopton, Olivia Laing, Sue Stuart-Smith, Jamie Compton, Fernando Caruncho, Amanda Feilding, Ron Finley, Maggi Hambling, Polly Nicholson, Olivia Harrison, Dan Pearson, Penny Rimbaud, Margot Henderson, Duncan Grant, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Bethan Wood, Isabella Tree, Juergen Teller, Charlie McCormick, Molly Goddard, Jeremy Lee, Margaret Howell, Alys Fowler, John Pawson, Amanda Harlech.
Read this meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness, which is also a powerful account of his life as an HIV positive man in the 1980s. In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness. Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of gay sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living. 'An essential - urgent - book for the 21st Century' Hans Ulrich Obrist This new edition features an introduction from Olivia Laing, the author of Crudo
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.
'Intensely moving, vital and artful' - Guardian 'A dizzying ride . . . both timely and beguiling' - Sunday Times At a moment in which basic rights are once again in danger, 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 travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X. Everybody is a crucial examination of the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world. Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 'An ambitious, absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum' - Evening Standard 'Laing's gift for weaving big ideas together with lyrical prose sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin. In other words, she is among the most significant voices of our time.' - Financial Times
Over sixty 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, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology and folklore. Lyrical and stirring, To the River is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE , THE GORDON BURN PRIZE, AND THE JAMES TAIT BLACK AWARD Dive in to this tale of love and loathing in the summer of 2017, the beach read of the summer. Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all. Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel in a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. A Goodbye to Berlin for the 21st century, Crudo charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker . . .
Upon changing his religion, a young man is denounced as an apostate and flees his country hiding in the back of a freezer lorry... After years of travelling and losing almost everything - his country, his children, his wife, his farm - an Afghan man finds unexpected warmth and comfort in a stranger's home... A student protester is forced to leave his homeland after a government crackdown, and spends the next 25 years in limbo, trapped in the UK asylum system... Modelled on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the second volume of Refugee Tales sets out to communicate the experiences of those who, having sought asylum in the UK, find themselves indefinitely detained. Here, poets and novelists create a space in which the stories of those who have been detained can be safely heard, a space in which hospitality is the prevailing discourse and listening becomes an act of welcome.
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.
Why were so many authors of the greatest works of literature consumed by alcoholism? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America, examining the links between creativity and drink in the overlapping work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. From Hemingway's Key West to Williams's New Orleans, Laing pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, and strips away the tangle of mythology to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.
I am glad I am alive to witness these things; giving words to this life of sensations is a relief. Smell the flowers while you can. Close to the Knives is the artist, writer and activist David Wojnarowicz's extraordinary memoir. Filthy, beautiful, and sharp to the point of piercing, it is both an exploration of the world seen through the eyes of an artist, and a moving portrait of a generation living, grieving, and dying through the AIDS crisis. It is a triumphant hymn of resistance, and a dizzying celebration of the joys of seeing and living in the world.
WHY IS IT THAT SOME OF THE GREATEST WORKS OF LITERATURE HAVE BEEN
PRODUCED BY WRITERS IN THE GRIP OF ALCOHOLISM, AN ADDICTION THAT
COST THEM PERSONAL HAPPINESS AND CAUSED HARM TO THOSE WHO LOVED
THEM?
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