Everybody

Reviews / Votes

An ambitious, absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum * Evening Standard * Astonishing . . . I love this book -- Esme Weijun Wang, author of <i>The Collected Schizophrenias</i> Laing's gift for weaving big ideas together with lyrical prose sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin. In other words, she is among the most significant voices of our time * Financial Times * Intensely moving, vital and artful -- Josh Cohen * Guardian * Radically subversive * The Times Literary Supplement * Laing has written a piercing book. That she has no final answer to the problem of freedom does not detract from her achievement. Indeed, she encourages us all to ask new questions to discover how it feels, and what it means, to be free. -- Aziz Huq * Washington Post * Laing is a truly thrilling thinker, with an impressively roving intellectual eye * Telegraph * Andrea Dworkin, Sontag, Malcolm X, Freud - they speak to us and come alive again, but we aren't asked to decide if they are good or bad; we can listen to their thoughts and ideas. It's a revelation in an age when we seem endlessly to judge and condemn our artists and thinkers -- Chantal Joffe * Guardian * Even as she glides between subjects and themes, Laing remains anchored by the bond between the body and personhood. In a standout chapter, she claims that the harm of violence is not the work it does to transform subjects into objects, but the incompletion of that work: the soul becomes a "ruin with a human face" * New Yorker * Bristles with energy and understanding as it charts the body's pleasures and pains, its fragilities, and endurance in the long 20th century . . . This really is a book for everybody -- Lisa Appignanesi, author of <i>Mad, Bad and Sad</i> A dizzying ride . . . both timely and beguiling * The Sunday Times * A quintessential book for the precarious moment we've found ourselves in * Washington Post * Olivia Laing writes so well and engagingly -- Philippa Perry, author of <i>How to Stay Sane</i> Olivia Laing's mind is a thrill to watch -- Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of <i>The Fact of a Body</i> Through [Laing's] 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 <i>You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine</i> A new book by Olivia Laing is always cause for celebration and Everybody: A Book About Freedom is no exception * Frieze * A provocative inquiry into the body's power and vulnerability . . . casting fresh light on the unending struggles for freedom and autonomy -- Jenn Shapland, author of <i>My Autobiography of Carson McCullers</i> Brainy, open-hearted and bold -- Sarah Schulman, author of <i>Conflict Is Not Abuse </i>and <i>Let the Record Show</i> Laing is radically empathetic, a writer-activist * Vulture * A free-wheeling and joyful exploration -- Jack Halberstam, author of <i>Gaga Feminism</i> At a time in which all of our bodies have made us so strangely isolated and dangerous to each other, Everybody is especially resonant; and shows us just how important it is to explore our sexual identity in order to know who we really are -- Julia Blackburn, author of<i> Time Songs</i> Impassioned and provocative . . . This lucid foray into some of life's deepest questions astonishes * Publishers Weekly, starred review * Intellectually vigorous and emotionally stirring * Kirkus, Starred Review * 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 * New Yorker *