Items related to The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking: Why...
Shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award.
Why were so many authors of the greatest works of literature consumed by alcoholism? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America, examining the links between creativity and drink in the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. Beautiful, captivating and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.
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Review:
Olivia Laing's writing is beautifully modulated, her tone knowledgeable yet intimate. She can evoke a state of mind as gracefully as she evokes a landscape. The Trip to Echo Spring is a book for all writers or would-be writers. It's one of the best books I've read about the creative uses of adversity: frightening but perversely inspiring (HILARY MANTEL)
The Trip to Echo Spring is original, brave and very moving. Laing's way of looking at a natural world that is free from human faults repeatedly prompts something like the "spiritual awakening" AA attendees hope for. Her insights shine with beauty yet are shaded by sympathy and compassion (Observer)
Laing's analysis of the complex addiction is consistently shrewd. But what makes The Trip to Echo Spring truly worthwhile is that she, like those she writes about, is a terrific writer (John Sutherland The Times)
I loved The Trip to Echo Spring. It's a beautiful book that has stayed with me in a profound way (NICK CAVE)
Beguiling and incisive (New York Times)
Laing's prose is lucid and exuberant. She rejects the opportunities for humour, although some of the stories are very funny indeed; and traces rather than interrogates her subjects. She knows them intimately and the result is a thoughtful study, part literary biography, part travel memoir (Financial Times)
Beguiling, beautifully written... brilliant and original (John Carey The Sunday Times)
Laing is a brilliant wordsmith and this is a beautifully accomplished book (Frances Spalding Independent)
It's deliciously evocative, Laing's melancholic and lyrical style conjuring the location, before effortlessly segueing into medical facts about alcoholism, the effects on the lives of each writer, and well-chosen passages from their work. This is a highly accomplished book, and highly recommended (The List)
A triumphant exercise in creative reading in which diary entries, letters, poems, stories and plays are woven together to explore deep, interconnected themes of dependence, denial and self-destructiveness. It is a testimony to this book's compelling power that having finished it, I immediately wanted to read it again (Scotland on Sunday)
Laing is a fine and stylish travel writer, with a sharp eye for passing detail and an acute ear for oddly amusing conversations (Gordon Bowker Independent: i & Radar)
Laing's descriptions of the American landscape, as she travels south from New York to New Orleans and Key West, and then north up to St Paul and Port Angeles, are a joy to read. She has a keen eye for the details of American streets... She captures the discomfort of long train journeys... and evokes the smells and sounds of an unknown city. A thunderstorm is recorded in intimate detail; the snatched conversations of fellow travellers are threaded into her narrative... there is much to enjoy in this trip across America. In Ms Laing's hands these famously complicated men become fragile, and terribly human (The Economist)
Laing writes so well, so seductively in fact, that this deconstructed way of pursuing a story works brilliantly again (London Evening Standard)
Laing is often perceptive. She has a flair for elegant, cursive summaries of these various bodies of work and the shaping pressures of drink upon them (Times Literary Supplement) --Times Literary Supplement
Book Description:
The Trip to Echo Spring is original, brave and very moving. Laing's way of looking at a natural world that is free from human faults repeatedly prompts something like the "spiritual awakening" AA attendees hope for. Her insights shine with beauty yet are shaded by sympathy and compassion (Observer)
Laing's analysis of the complex addiction is consistently shrewd. But what makes The Trip to Echo Spring truly worthwhile is that she, like those she writes about, is a terrific writer (John Sutherland The Times)
I loved The Trip to Echo Spring. It's a beautiful book that has stayed with me in a profound way (NICK CAVE)
Beguiling and incisive (New York Times)
Laing's prose is lucid and exuberant. She rejects the opportunities for humour, although some of the stories are very funny indeed; and traces rather than interrogates her subjects. She knows them intimately and the result is a thoughtful study, part literary biography, part travel memoir (Financial Times)
Beguiling, beautifully written... brilliant and original (John Carey The Sunday Times)
Laing is a brilliant wordsmith and this is a beautifully accomplished book (Frances Spalding Independent)
It's deliciously evocative, Laing's melancholic and lyrical style conjuring the location, before effortlessly segueing into medical facts about alcoholism, the effects on the lives of each writer, and well-chosen passages from their work. This is a highly accomplished book, and highly recommended (The List)
A triumphant exercise in creative reading in which diary entries, letters, poems, stories and plays are woven together to explore deep, interconnected themes of dependence, denial and self-destructiveness. It is a testimony to this book's compelling power that having finished it, I immediately wanted to read it again (Scotland on Sunday)
Laing is a fine and stylish travel writer, with a sharp eye for passing detail and an acute ear for oddly amusing conversations (Gordon Bowker Independent: i & Radar)
Laing's descriptions of the American landscape, as she travels south from New York to New Orleans and Key West, and then north up to St Paul and Port Angeles, are a joy to read. She has a keen eye for the details of American streets... She captures the discomfort of long train journeys... and evokes the smells and sounds of an unknown city. A thunderstorm is recorded in intimate detail; the snatched conversations of fellow travellers are threaded into her narrative... there is much to enjoy in this trip across America. In Ms Laing's hands these famously complicated men become fragile, and terribly human (The Economist)
Laing writes so well, so seductively in fact, that this deconstructed way of pursuing a story works brilliantly again (London Evening Standard)
Laing is often perceptive. She has a flair for elegant, cursive summaries of these various bodies of work and the shaping pressures of drink upon them (Times Literary Supplement) --Times Literary Supplement
One of the best reviewed books of 2013, also shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award, now available in paperback
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- PublisherCanongate Books Ltd
- Publication date2014
- ISBN 10 1847677959
- ISBN 13 9781847677952
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages352
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The Trip to Echo Spring
Published by
Canongate Books Ltd.
(2014)
ISBN 10: 1847677959
ISBN 13: 9781847677952
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