The Garden Against Time In Search Of A Common Paradise

Download or read book The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise written by Olivia Laing and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2024-06-25 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2024 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction Finalist for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing A #1 Sunday Times (UK) Bestseller A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An Oprah Daily Summer Reading Recommendation Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, "imaginative and empathetic critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise. In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there’s still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

Download or read book Everybody: A Book about Freedom written by Olivia Laing and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Astute and consistently surprising critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing investigates the body and its discontents through the great freedom movements of the twentieth century. The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing 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. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

Download or read book Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency written by Olivia Laing and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the finest writers of the new nonfiction” (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in our tumultuous modern era. In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We’re often told that art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.

Download or read book The Englishman's Garden written by Alvilde Lees-Milne and published by Allan Lane. This book was released on 1982 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty-three gardens of exceptional merit, quality, and beauty are described by their owners, professional and nonprofessional gardeners, recounting the planning and maintenance of the garden in detail.

Download or read book First Garden written by and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2011 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the history of vegetable gardening at the White House, concluding with a list of favorite White House recipes.

Download or read book Derek Jarman's Garden written by Derek Jarman and published by . This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Derek Jarmans Garden is the last book Jarman ever wrote. It is a fitting memorial to a brilliant and greatly loved artist and film maker who, against all odds, made a breathtaking garden in the most inhospitable of places the flat, bleak, often desolate expanse of shingle overlooked by the Dungeness nuclear power station. Here is Jarmans own record of how the garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to the last year of his life. More than 150 photographs by his friend Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages and at every season of the year, revealing its complex geometrical plan, magical stone circles and the beautiful and bizarre scupltures. We also catch glimpses of Jarman at work on the garden. This beautiful book will appeal to all those who love gardens and gardening, as well as the legions of admirers of this extraordinary man.

Download or read book Crudo written by Olivia Laing and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'I couldn't put it down' – Sally Rooney, author of Normal People Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment – marriage. But it’s not only Kathy who is changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, 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 it could all end at any moment? From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a politically-paralysed UK, Olivia Laing's first novel is a love letter, inspired by the life and work of Kathy Acker. It is a blistering rewire of the form and a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. '[Crudo] will blow you away' – Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize