At Kirkus, Olivia Laing discusses her new book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom, and why she chose the idiosyncratic Wilhelm Reich as its central figure. “I’ve had a career of writing about difficult and complicated people,” Laing says, “and Reich takes the biscuit. He had been a sexual liberationist, he’d been an anti-fascist. He had this visionary idea in the 1920s of uniting the ideas of Freud and Marx; he thought that trauma was encapsulated in the body, that it lived in the body. And at the same time, he saw our bodies as agents of change.”
Olivia Laing Conjures Up Complicated and Difficult People
Tales of the Library
“The reality of being a librarian is that it’s hardly ever about sitting down and it has absolutely nothing to do with peace and quiet.” Lit Hub launched Tales of the Library, a new bimonthly column, by Kristen Arnett. From our archives: an essay about libraries and homelessness.
A Generation of Writers Influenced by Octavia Butler
Hillel Italie speaks to writers like N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okarafor about Octavia Butler's undeniable influence on a generation of thinkers and artists.
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Writing Contests Galore
Two of my favorite writing contests are wrapping up this October. You have until the first of the month to enter the Missouri Review’s Editors’ Prize Contest. $5,000 will be awarded to the best fiction, essay, and poetry. Meanwhile, you have until October 31st to enter DIAGRAM’s Essay Contest, which is open to all types of essays such as those “in an expansive sense, meaning essay as experiment, essay as heterogenous and sometimes strange or unruly beast.” That contest’s prize is $1,000 plus publication.
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Something More Pleasant
You may have read some of our pieces on graphic novels and comics. The form is increasingly seen as an indispensable genre of literature. At Slate, a team of judges select the nominees for their third annual Cartoonist Studio Prize, including Here by Richard McGuire and Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast.
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