★proposal階段W. W. Norton在激烈競標中簽下北美版權！

EVERYBODY asks what it means to inhabit a body in the 21st century: a body that must necessarily age, sicken and die, that is subject to violence, and yet which remains a potent vehicle for human connection and political liberation.

Like Olivia’s previous books, To the River about Virginia Woolf and the river Ouse, The Trip to Echo Spring about writers and alcoholism and The Lonely City about loneliness and alienation in the city and the art it inspires, EVERYBODY will be an ambitious and wide-ranging investigation, using memoir, biography and cultural criticism.

Olivia will look at art, paintings, films and performance of the past six decades, and draw on her own experiences—including a background in alternative medicine and protest—to enrich and ground her thinking about what a body is, what it carries and expresses, and how it can resist oppression of all kinds.

Subjects will include Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian psychoanalyst, who invented body-based psychotherapy that exists on the notion that repression manifests physically (Susan Sontag On Illness As Metaphor and Todd Haynes’ Safe will be examined); she will examine bodies and racism, considering the Black Lives Matter movement and the work of Michael Jackson, Kara Walker and William Pope L., and what happens when cultures value certain bodies more than others; violence and the body, looking at the work of Francis Bacon, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. She’ll turn too, to body and sexuality, body and gender, body and spirit, and body and performance, with subjects ranging from video futurist Ryan Trecartin, gender warriors like Marsha P. Johnson and Kate Bornstein, painter Agnes Marti, performers Justin Vivian Bond and Nina Simone and others.

EVERYBODY is her biggest and most ambitious book to date, and it will be a book for everybody, about the one thing we all share.

 

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. Her work appears in numerous publications, including the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, Frieze and New York Times. She’s a Yaddo and MacDowell Fellow and was 2014 Eccles Writer in Residence at the British Library. Her first book, To the River, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. The Trip to Echo Spring was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award and the 2014 Gordon Burn Prize. She lives in Cambridge.