OLIVIA LAING

Wednesday May 5, 2021
1:00 pm Central
Ticketed Event

Join us for a special daytime event as we present renowned British writer Olivia Laing and celebrate the publication of her new book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Norton). In this ambitious, brilliant book, Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, exploring gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement along the way. 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.

Tickets to this virtual event include a signed copy of Everybody: A Book About Freedom. Each registered attendee will also receive a special “Everybody” button with their book, and be entered into a raffle to win an 18K gold-plated sterling silver necklace which celebrates Laing’s brilliant new book. Winner announced during the event!

This Rain Taxi presentation, unique in Laing’s U.S. tour, will be a special audience participation event—attendees are welcome to submit questions for the author in advance, and she will be incorporating them into her talk! Questions can be submitted right on the ticket form; we will also be taking questions during the presentation. Whether you ask your query early or on the fly, we look forward to seeing you there!


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Olivia Laing is the author of three acclaimed works of nonfiction, To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), and The Lonely City (2016), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and has been translated into seventeen languages. Her first novel, Crudo, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2019 James Tait Black Prize. She writes for the Guardian, New York Times, and frieze, among many other publications. Her collected writing on art, Funny Weather, was published in 2020. The recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize in nonfiction, Laing lives in Suffolk, UK.