How It Would Feel to Be Free: Olivia Laing’s Everybody
Pleasures and possibilities, though, come hard-won in this book.
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Posts Tagged: Olivia Laing
What to Read When in Search of Bodies
Megan Milks shares a reading list to celebrate MARGARET AND THE MISSING BODY.
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Notable Online: 5/2–5/9
Literary events taking place virtually this week!
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The Lenses We Can’t See: A Conversation with Howard Axelrod
Howard Axelrod discusses his new book, THE STARS IN OUR POCKETS.
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Notable NYC: 9/15–9/21
Literary events in and around NYC this week!
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The Rumpus Interview with Jon Day
Jon Day discusses his memoir, Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, the bicycle as a symbol of gentrification, and the city as “a technology for living.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Danniel Schoonebeek
Danniel Schoonebeek discusses living a quiet life in the Catskills, the importance of travel, partying in the woods with poets, and how capitalism forces people to be cruel to each other.
...moreAn Urban Sort of Loneliness
The Lonely City bristles with heart-piercing wisdom. Loneliness, according to Laing, feels “like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.” Later, she admits that at one point during her own hermetic existence in New York, “I felt like I was in danger of vanishing.” Thankfully The Lonely City goes far beyond a cry for […]
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The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
Zack Hatfield reviews The Lonely City by Olivia Laing today in Rumpus Books.
...moreLadies Drink Free
Whether glamorized or pitied, the figure of the alcoholic writer has long been a subject of cultural fascination. Having written a book on the usual suspects—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al.—Olivia Laing asks the unfortunately necessary follow-up question: okay, but what about the women? At the Guardian, she explores female writers’s reasons for drinking, as well as society’s tendency to […]
...moreAddiction, Alcohol, and Authors
You didn’t ask directly about gender, but I’ll answer anyway: I stuck with men for a more personal reason, which is that my experience as a child was with a female alcoholic and the subject was just too painful for me. That’s a book I hope someone writes. Buzzfeed’s interview with Olivia Laing, author of The […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Olivia Laing
Writer, journalist, and critic Olivia Laing discusses her newest book, The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, and the challenges of looking into the mind of an alcoholic versus the mind of a writer.
...moreWriting and Drinking and Writing about Drinking
Alcohol and authors. It’s a subject so old and rich and fraught you could write a book on it—which is exactly what Olivia Laing did. That book is called The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink, and Blake Morrison’s review of it in the Guardian is itself a great essay on the subject, covering writers’ love […]
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