Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

One of the finest writers of the new nonfiction (Harpers Bazaar) explores the role of art in our tumultuous modern era. In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a careers worth of Laings writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia OKeeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. Were often told that art cant change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.