Everybody

Acclaimed author Olivia Laing examines the life of renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart an electrifying course through the great freedom movements of the twentieth century.

Everybody: A Vital Examination of the Long Struggle for Bodily Freedom

From the award-winning author of Crudo, Everybody is an exhilarating and eminently readable study of the long struggle for bodily freedom - from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement.

Drawing on their own experiences in protest and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Olivia Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X.

At a time when basic rights are once again in danger, Everybody is a crucial examination of the forces arranged against freedom - and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

'Intensely moving, vital and artful' - Guardian

'A dizzying ride . . . both timely and beguiling' - Sunday Times

'An ambitious, absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum' - Evening Standard

'Sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin' - Financial Times

Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize.

Everybody possesses a looseness, richness, and abundance of originality . . . One does not expect a political study to perform such sharp close readings of art and literature, or to describe emotions so elegantly. Line by line and thought by thought, Laing writes with surgical discipline

Autorentext
Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. They're the author of several books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and Funny Weather. Their first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Their work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 they were awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.

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?Simply one of our most exciting writers' Observer

?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