The Center for Fiction Presents Olivia Laing on The Silver Book with Rachel Kushner (Virtual Event)

Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT November 11, 2025

Virtual Only

Cover of Olivia Laing's The Silver Book, with a black and white Italian street and a pink and yellow rainbow shimmer in the middle

Step into the world of The Silver Book with Olivia Laing, award-winning author of The Lonely City, Everybody, and Funny Weather, as they join us for a virtual event on November 11th to discuss their spellbinding new novel of art, queer love, and illusion. Laing will be joined in conversation by acclaimed novelist Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room.

In The Silver Book, Laing returns to fiction with a sweeping, sensual story set amid the glittering artifice of 1970s Italian cinema. Against the backdrop of Rome’s Cinecittà studios, where Fellini and Pasolini are reimagining beauty, power, and desire, a young English artist becomes entangled in a world of illusion, danger, and forbidden love. Lushly atmospheric and politically charged, The Silver Book explores what it means to make art in times of unrest, and how beauty itself can become an act of resistance.

Laing, celebrated for their acclaimed nonfiction and deep engagement with art and culture, brings their signature insight and lyricism to this haunting work of historical fiction. Blending truth and imagination, intimacy and spectacle, The Silver Book is both a love story and a meditation on the moral power of art.

Kushner shares Laing’s fascination with artists working in the shadow of political and personal upheaval. Both writers explore the charged space where art collides with power and desire. Join Laing and Kushner for a journey behind the curtain of illusion, as they reflect on the politics of beauty, the intimacy of art, and the dangerous seduction of storytelling.

Cover of Olivia Laing's The Silver Book, with a black and white Italian street and a pink and yellow rainbow shimmer in the middle

In Conversation

  • Headshot of Olivia Laing

    Olivia Laing

    Olivia Laing

    Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. They’re the author of eight books, including The Lonely City, Everybody, and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time. Laing’s first novel, Crudo, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2018 they were awarded the Windham–Campbell Prize for nonfiction. Their books have been translated into twenty-one languages.


    Photo Credit: Sophie Davidson

  • Rk-Headshot Large

    Rachel Kushner

    Rachel Kushner

    Rachel Kushner is the author of the New York Times bestseller Creation Lake, her latest novel; The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection; and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction. Creation Lake was also longlisted for the National Book Award. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.


    Photo Credit: Chloe Aftel

Featured Book

  1. . 
    Cover of Olivia Laing's The Silver Book, with a black and white Italian street and a pink and yellow rainbow shimmer in the middle

    The Silver Book

    By Olivia Laing

    Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

    PURCHASE

    It is September 1974. Two men meet in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realizing the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. A young apprentice is just what he needs.

    He sweeps Nicholas to Rome and introduces him to the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. In the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism.

    But Nicholas has a secret, and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amid the rising tensions of Italy’s Years of Lead, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he doesn’t intend.

    Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book is at once a queer love story and a noirish thriller set in the dream factory of cinema. It is a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.

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