Crudo Olivia Laing by Olivia Laing 9780393357417, 0393357414 instant download after payment.

A brilliant, funny, and emphatically raw novel of love on the brink of the apocalypse, from the acclaimed author of The Lonely City. Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize and the James Tait Black Award.

"With this brief, breathless experimental novel, Laing (The Lonely City, 2016, etc.) has left the world of literary nonfiction behind and planted an explorer's flag in an unusual, individual destination somewhere on the continent of fiction... Mysterious, bizarre, frustrating, weirdly smart, and pretty cool."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It's the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Fast-paced and frantic, Crudo unfolds in real-time from the full-throttle perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker.

From a Tuscan hotel for the superrich to a Brexit-paralyzed United Kingdom, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties adjusting to the idea of a lifelong commitment. But it's not only Kathy who's changing. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever closer to nuclear war. How do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all?

"...Crudo seduces from the first sentence. Laing as Acker is not a literary device – it is literary detonation. Everything accelerates from there ... Laing’s prose shimmers and is selfish then, suddenly, full of love. It’s a high-wire act. This is the novel as a love letter to Acker... She asks us what a novel can do when unreality rules. She asks what it is like to be alive when the old order is dying."  -  Suzanne Moore, The Guardian

In Crudo, her first work of fiction, Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel with a fierce, brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of learning to love when the end of the world seems near.