Everybody

''Simply one of our most exciting writers'' - O bserver ''A free-wheeling and joyful exploration of the works and lives of a range of artists and thinkers who brought libidinal and creative energy together with spectacular results'' - Jack Halberstam 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. ''A brave writer whose books open up fundamental questions about life and art'' - Telegraph

Report

An ambitious, absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum, like going on a funfair ride with a very clever friend Evening Standard

Product details

• Authors: Olivia Laing, Laing Olivia
• Publisher: Picador Uk
• Languages: English
• Age Recommendation: from age 18
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 29.04.2021
• EAN: 9781509857111
• ISBN: 978-1-5098-5711-1
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 163 mm x 242 mm x 43 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Psychology; LGBT, civil rights, Psychology: states of consciousness, Feminism & feminist theory, c 1938 to c 1946 (World War Two period), Feminism and feminist theory, c 1939 to c 1945 (including WW2), Human rights, civil rights, Biography: philosophy and social sciences, Physical anthropology, Art & Politics, LGBT Studies / Gay Studies, 1918–1933 (period of the Weimar Republic), Freedom of expression law