Olivia and her friends are auditioning for a production of 'Romeo and Juliet' in the West End. It makes Olivia realise just how much she wants to be an actress, like her mum was. But her father asks her to perform with him in a high-wire stunt instead. How can she choose between her parents? And love is in the air at the Swan School of Theatre and Dance. But when the curtain falls, will everyone get their fairytale happy ending?
It's winter at the Swan Academy, and that means panto! While Olivia practises being the back end of a horse, everyone else is auditioning for a major new movie. Soon the school is full of rivalry and suspicion, nasty tricks and strange mysteries. To lighten the mood, Eel organises a festive ice-skating trip. But as the skaters twirl and leap among the twinkling lights, Olivia realises that the season of goodwill is anything but.
Olivia is sad and lonely and angry -- angry that she's been dumped with her sister eel at her grandmother's school, and angrier still that that school turns out to be a stage school where there's no encouragement for her to do what she loves best: practice her circus skills.
The Swan Academy is under threat from closure due to a building development next door. Into this tense atmosphere come Cosmo and Cosmina, the famous singing/acting twins from Hollywood. They are staring in Peter Pan and are learning to fly! A series of mysterious accidents in the theatre threaten to close the production. Who is out to sabotage everything...and why?
Jack Marvell's latest stunt is to stay on a high-wire for thirty days and nights. Olivia is worried for her father, but very proud of him. Then the rumours start, claiming that Jack's cheating. Olivia must give her all to her role in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and also prove to the world that her father is no fraudster...
Olivia is waiting impatiently to tell her best friends the good news about the highwire act -- it's been picked to perform in New York for a night! But her friends have news of their own... Olivia loses herself in learning the trapeze, while Tom begins his West End stage career in The Sound of Music. But weird things keep happening, and soon Tom is on the verge of losing everything he's ever wanted. It wouldn't have anything to do with the return of Katie Wilkes-Cox, would it? In a nail-biting finale, Olivia performs not one but two daring rescues before tragedy strikes... As for Katie, could it be So Long, Farewell ... for ever...
A dazzling debut collection of raw and explosive poems about growing up in a sexist, sensationalized world, from a thrilling new feminist voice. i’m a good girl, bad girl, dream girl, sad girl girl next door sunbathing in the driveway i wanna be them all at once, i wanna be all the girls I’ve ever loved —from “Girl” Lauded for the power of her writing and having attracted an online fan base of millions for her extraordinary spoken-word performances, Olivia Gatwood now weaves together her own coming-of-age with an investigation into our culture’s romanticization of violence against women. At times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant, Life of the Party explores the boundary between what is real and what is imagined in a life saturated with fear. Gatwood asks, How does a girl grow into a woman in a world racked by violence? Where is the line between perpetrator and victim? In precise, searing language, she illustrates how what happens to our bodies can make us who we are. Praise for Life of the Party “Delicately devastating, this book will make us all ‘feel less alone in the dark.’ ”—Miel Bredouw, writer and comedian, Punch Up the Jam “Gatwood writes about the women who were forgotten and the men who got off too easy with an effortlessness and empathy and anger that yanked every emotion on the spectrum out of me. Imagine, we get to live in the age of Olivia Gatwood. Goddamn.”—Jamie Loftus, writer and comedian, Boss Whom Is Girl and The Bechdel Cast “I’ve read every poem in Life of the Party. I’ve read each of them more than once. In some parts of the book the spine is already breaking because I’ve spent so much time poring over it and losing hours in this world Olivia Gatwood has partly created, but partly just invited the reader to enter on their own, caution signs be damned. This book is enlightening, inspiring, igniting, and f***ing scary. I loved every word on every page with a ferocity that frightened me.”—Madeline Brewer, actress, The Handmaid’s Tale, Orange Is the New Black, and Cam
Somewhere in the Jim Crow South, the sky is on fire. A pregnant Olivia’s fierce speechwriting is the true force behind her charismatic husband, Charles, and his successful Movement, galvanizing people to march towards freedom. When four little girls are bombed in a church, Olivia and Charles’ marriage is threatened—as this tragedy and years of civil unrest leave Olivia believing that “this world ain’t no place to raise a colored child.”
"Astute and consistently surprising critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing investigates the body and its discontents through the great freedom movements of the twentieth century. The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century—among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X. Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.
2017 Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry Book Runner-Up One of the most recognizable young poets in America, Olivia Gatwood dazzles with her tribute to contemporary American womanhood in her debut book, New American Best Friend. Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.
