Olivia Laing, prize-winning, bestselling author of The Lonely City and Crudo, returns with a career-spanning collection of essays on the power of art in times of crisis.
Olivia Laing is the author of three acclaimed works of non-fiction. To the River (2011) was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. The Trip to Echo Spring (2013) was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. The Lonely City (2015) won the Eccles British Library Writer's Award, was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and has been translated into fifteen languages. Her first novel, Crudo, was published in 2018 to great critical acclaim. It was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.
A brave writer whose books open up fundamental questions about life
and art
*Telegraph*
Olivia Laing is my new favourite non-fiction writer
*Nick Hornby*
Like all great critics, Olivia Laing combines formidable
intelligence with boundless curiosity and fabulous taste, but she
also has a rare quality of intimacy; an ability to connect the
reader to a work of art or literature with a directness that lights
it up like nothing else. It’s why I read her
*James Lasdun*
A warm, thinking, enticing sweep of a book, like spending the
afternoon with your brainiest friend
*Kate Mosse, author of The Burning Chambers*
Her observations and poetic incisiveness on art, writers and
politics are a gift. This is a fascinating, excursive, tonic of a
book
*Sinead Gleeson, author of Constellations*
A thought-provoking, inspiring collection that you can go back to
whenever the weather takes a funny turn
*Evening Standard*
Funny Weather gives the reader a tangible sense of the sprawling
garden of work which Laing has planted. She is to the art world
what David Attenborough is to nature: a worthy guide with both a
macro and micro vision, fluent in her chosen tongue and always full
of empathy and awe
*Irish Times*
Laing has acted as a kind of cultural sage for the past four years,
an accidental literary grande dame of the emotional havoc wrought
by late capitalism and digital disconnect
*New York Magazine*
Olivia Laing combines passion and curiosity in a collection of
art-based essays and profiles that reflect the uncertainty of our
age
*Observer*
The hospitality of world view in Olivia’s writing is a vital force
in our disputatious present
*Maria Balshaw, director of Tate*
Never has a publication been more timely
*Dazed*
A fine writer’s embrace of the artists who preceded her, friendly
visits with their lives and loving acknowledgement of their
foundational contributions. A work of joy in recognition
*Sarah Schulman*
The book to help you make sense of the world . . . [a] mesmerizing
collection of essays . . . this unique and compassionate book is a
mind-expanding opportunity to rethink how we live, and what we can
do to change things for the better.
*Stylist*
A light-footed tour of enriching stories, lives, and ideas
*Dazed and Confused*
Her gift as a critic is her ability to imaginatively sympathize
with her subjects in a way that allows the art and life of the
artist to go on radiating meaning after the book is closed
*Elle*
Breathtaking, beautiful, funny, shocking, sad, revealing, and
timely
*Nina Stibbe, author of Love, Nina*
I yield to absolutely no one in my admiration of Olivia Laing; her
essays are magical liberations of words and ideas, art and love;
they're the essence of great 21st century literature: brilliantly
expressed, wildly uncontained, wilful and wonderfully unbound.
*Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR*
Olivia Laing shines the light for art writing. Funny Weather urges
us to humanise art, and listen to what artists say about life, love
and crisis.
*Charlie Porter*
An incivisive meditation on the value of heartfelt, messy art in
our paranoid times
*Telegraph*
...leavened by empathy and an omnivorous curiosity
*Guardian*
It’s not just art we need in an emergency, but writers, like Laing,
who gently guide our eyes to what’s out there
*Observer*
Vibrant commentary on art and society by a writer with a sharp eye
for the offbeat
*Kirkus*
Laing’s essays are urgent, compassionate, enlivening and acutely
perceptive, and that’s true whether or not we encounter them “in an
emergency”
*the arts desk*
Her words seem balefully accurate, given what has now overtaken
us
*Financial Times*
Laing is an intelligent and acute writer, and this book is
certainly interesting and assuredly well-written
*Scotsman*
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