Everybody

Resumen del libro

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.

Biografía del autor

Olivia Laing es autora de tres obras de no ficción, El viaje a Echo Spring, La ciudad solitaria y To the River, que han sido traducidas a dieciocho idiomas y se han vendido más de 100.000 copias en todo el mundo. Su primera novela, Crudo, fue bestseller del Sunday Times y ganó el premio James Tait Memorial de 2019. Es miembro de la Royal Society of Literature y en 2018 recibió el premio Windham-Campbell de no ficción. Laing escribe sobre arte y cultura para distintos medios, entre los que destacan The Guardian, The New York Times y Frieze. Su recopilación de escritos sobre arte, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, se publicó en 2020. Vive en Suffolk.