Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

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In this collection of essays, Olivia Laing generously shares her influences and enthusiasms. By reading about the lives and work of these varied visual artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers, we join Laing in celebrating art that opens doors and dismantles walls. She suggests new ways of seeing that focus on seeking pleasure, as a way to repair our relationship with a broken world. Laing invites all of us in, and says, “Yes. You are welcome here.” Recommended By Adam P., Powells.com

In the age of Trump and Brexit, every crisis is instantly overridden by the next. The turbulent political weather of the twenty- first century generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Olivia Laing makes a brilliant, inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair. Art, she argues, changes how we see the world. It gives us X-ray vision. It reveals inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living.

Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, and their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Wolfgang Tillmans, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, Funny Weather celebrates art as an antidote to a terrifying political moment.

"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 twenty-first century literature: brilliantly expressed, wildly uncontained, willful, and wonderfully unbound." Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

"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 (or for that matter a facet of life itself) with a directness that lights it up like nothing else. It’s why I read her." James Lasdun, author of Afternoon of a Faun

"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, author of Conflict Is Not Abuse

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She writes for the Guardian, the New York Times, and Frieze, among many other publications. Her first novel, Crudo, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2019 James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. Her nonfiction works include To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, and The Lonely City, which has sold more than 100,000 copies and been translated into sixteen languages. The recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize in nonfiction, Laing lives in London, England.