Everybody
A Book about Freedom
by Olivia Laing
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Pub Date May 04 2021 | Archive Date Apr 30 2021
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Description
"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 rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.
Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling 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, 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. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.
About the Author: Olivia Laing is the author of three acclaimed works of nonfiction, To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), and The Lonely City (2016), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and has been translated into seventeen languages. Her first novel, Crudo, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2019 James Tait Black Prize. She writes for the Guardian, New York Times, and frieze, among many other publications. Her collected writing on art, Funny Weather, was published in 2020. The recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize in nonfiction, Laing lives in Suffolk, UK.
Advance Praise
"This lucid foray into some of life’s deepest questions astonishes." - Publishers Weekly, starred review
"This is an astonishing project, written with equal parts stirring passion and capable intellect. Laing puts into words experiences I had never before seen in print, and the world is better for it. I love this book." - Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
"Everybody is a riveting and fascinating innovative historiography of twentieth century Euro-American radical thought…Brainy, open-hearted, and bold." - Sarah Schulman, author of Conflict Is Not Abuse and Let the Record Show
"Reading Everybody felt like hanging out with my absolute smartest friend having, somehow, the precise conversation I need to have in this historical moment. Olivia Laing’s mind is a thrill to watch, and the connections she draws between the body, sex, art, and freedom made the world around me buzz with new depth and possibility, connections revealed and illuminated. Rare is the book that makes you feel more alive just in reading it, but Everybody does just that." - Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body
"A provocative inquiry into the body’s power and vulnerability, Everybody combines deep research, historical gossip, unsung queer lives, and deliciously readable prose. Laing reckons with her own gender and embodiment alongside major and minor theorists, artists, and activists, casting fresh light on the unending struggles for freedom and autonomy" - Jenn Shapland, author of National Book Award finalist My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
"Laing’s Everybody animates flesh with the incandescent force of histories both individual and collective. Through her incisive lens, the body—that knot of mind, matter, culture, and society that we dwell inescapably within—becomes almost impossibly fascinating." - Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780393608779 |
| PRICE | $26.95 (USD) |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Mandy M, Reviewer
"Just imagine what we could do. Just imagine what we could build."
This book was poignant, thoughtful, incredible, heart-wrenching, beautiful, sad and brilliantly written. Olivia Laing took these ideas that were floating around and brought them together into one informative and absolutely incredibly written piece.
A piece of work that deserves to be read and studied in incredible detail.
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