“It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”
“When I try to imagine the addresses of the houses and apartments I lived in before my grandparents kidnapped me, I can’t remember anything.”
“How rich and diverse, how complex and non-linear the history of all women is.”
“All that matters is that you are making something you love, to the best of your ability, here and now.”
“Today it’s widely regarded as a classic of American literature. But Fante’s masterpiece has not always enjoyed such prominence. In fact, its journey to its current status has been long and highly unusual…”
Rob Woodard
Guardian
How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes - Mastermind - Maria Konnikova. From Practical Psychology
‘It is exhilarating to witness this method operating in non-fiction too. Stitching and collaging odd fragments and genres together, Laing goes beyond reparation to offer something beautifully integrated, original, compassionate. She does not pose as a professional expert; her very subjectivity, her own suffering, confer her authority because they are so enmeshed with her powerful intelligence’
Michele Roberts
The Independent
“How art helped me see the beauty in loneliness…” An edited extract of The Lonely City
Olivia Laing
The Guardian
Artist and writer and Raoul Martinez joins Robin and Josie to kick of Season 5 of Book Shambles. They discuss Creating Freedom, have a debate about free will and chat books
Bookshambles
ACast
“It is flourishes like these, and countless others, that deliver in Lolito a credible, often exquisite work sure to court at least a little controversy in its depiction of ageless (im)maturity. And though there may be some hot debate on the topic at the moment, Lolito won’t ever become a tiny corner forgotten”
Declan Tan
The Huffington Post
‘Nan Shepherd’s prose is as bracing as water from a mountain stream’
Nicholas Lezard
The Guardian
Nan Shepherd: How one woman saw the Cairngorms in a different light
Steven Brocklehurst
The BBC