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,...

Why is it that some of the greatest works of literature have been produced by writers in the grip of alcohism, an addiction that cost them personal happiness and caused harm to those who loved them?In 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 Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All...

""One of the finest writers of the new non-fiction" (Harper's Bazaar) explores the role of art in the tumultuous twenty-first century. 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...