Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism#1 Book of the Year from Brain PickingsNamed a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit HubA dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the liv...

**A New York Times Notable BookNamed a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Washington Post, NPR, Guardian, Esquire, and Bustle"Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is." —The New Yorker**It’s the summer of 2017 and Kathy is getting married. Meanwhile, fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever closer to nuclear war. In C...

Art, power, desire, and illusion collide in a hypnotic new novel from Olivia Laing, set in the months leading up to the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975.It is September 1974. Two men meet in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realizing the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s ...

An author's walk "from source to sea along the Ouse in Sussex is a meandering, meditative delight" drawing on history, literature, and the river itself ( The Guardian, UK).In To The River, author Olivia Laing embarks on a weeklong, midsummer odyssey along the banks of the River Ouse in Sussex, England, from its source near Haywards Heath to the sea, where it empties into the Channel at Newhaven. More than sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned he...

**Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, "imaginative and empathetic critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise."An impassioned and wide-ranging work." —A.O. Scott, New York Times Book ReviewFinalist for the 2024 Kirkus Prize for NonfictionFinalist for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature WritingA #1 Sunday Times (UK) Bestseller • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Kirku...

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, ...

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

“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 ...

The first collected edition of legendary writer, actress, and adventurer Cookie Mueller's stories, featuring the entire contents of her 1990 book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished.Legendary as an underground actress, female adventurer, and East Village raconteur, Cookie Mueller's first calling was to the written word: "I started writing when I was six and have never stoppe...

Tony Peake enjoyed unprecedented access to the visionary artist's archives in order to bring the extraordinary life of Derek Jarman to the page.This authorised and unique biography covers Jarman's story from the bleakness of post-war Britain and his RAF childhood, to student life at The Slade and his work as a designer, painter and filmmaker. It tells how energetic home filmmaking with dazzling friends led to distinctive feature films including Sebastiane, The...

A "most beguiling and incisive" account of how writers in the grip of alcoholism created some of American literature's greatest works ( New York Times).A New York Times Notable Book of 2014A Time Magazine Notable Book of 2014In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzge...

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.