Olivia Laing's Crudo to be published by Picador
Picador is delighted to announce the acquisition of a novel and a work of non-fiction from prize-winning writer Olivia Laing.
Picador is delighted to announce the acquisition of a novel and a work of non-fiction from prize-winning writer Olivia Laing. Crudo, Laing’s first move into fiction, is a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse, which publishes in hardback in July 2018 and is available to pre-order now.
Olivia Laing’s most recent book, The Lonely City, was published to remarkable critical acclaim, and her next work of non-fiction Everybody (which will publish in Spring 2020) will cement her position as one of the most brilliant and original writers of contemporary non-fiction.
Paul Baggaley, Publisher at Picador, said: “I have been an admirer of Olivia Laing’s writing for many years and have been very excited by the way she has developed her unique form of personal and cultural non-fiction. I am so excited she has come to Picador with two very different books which highlight her remarkable talent, both addressing the way we live now whilst challenging form and genre in the most imaginative ways. Crudo is witty and original, an exhilarating and daring novel about finding love amidst the global chaos of the summer of 2017. Everybody will be a major work of non-fiction that will examine the body in the modern era, combining themes of sexuality, gender, protest, art and personal experience.”
Olivia Laing said “I’m thrilled to be joining Picador, a publisher that has an amazing track record for exciting literature of all genres. I had no intention of writing a novel before this summer, but it felt like a way of responding with speed and flexibility and passion to this violent and frightening year. I wrote it in a fury: two months of exploring in real time how it felt to live in a world where love and truth were becoming increasingly endangered.”
About the books:
Crudo
Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart.
A Goodbye to Berlin for the twenty-first century, Crudo charts in real-time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic peripatetic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker.
From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead and the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all?
Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel in a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse.
Everybody
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.