Swimming Studies

As a teenager, Leanne Shapton trained for the Olympic swimming trials; now an artist, she is still drawn inexorably to swimming, in pools and the sea. What do you do with an all-absorbing activity once it's past its relevance, and yet you can't quite give it up? Swimming Studiesis a lyrical, playful work that explores what it is like to move from a world of competition to one of recreation and introspection, giving a sideways glimpse into memory, adolescence, swimming,...
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As a teenager, Leanne Shapton trained for the Olympic swimming trials; now an artist, she is still drawn inexorably to swimming, in pools and the sea. What do you do with an all-absorbing activity once it's past its relevance, and yet you can't quite give it up? Swimming Studiesis a lyrical, playful work that explores what it is like to move from a world of competition to one of recreation and introspection, giving a sideways glimpse into memory, adolescence, swimming, drawing, obsession and solitude.

'Vivid with chlorine-bleached swimsuits, and post-match sorrow.' Caitlin Moran, Observer, Books of the Year

'A rich account . . . told with the originality and playfulness of an artist . . . Shapton shares Dave Eggers' talent for taking the mundane and making it viscerally new.' The Times

'Captures a bittersweet part of the writer's past as completely as a scent trapped in a bottle.' John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

'Exquisite . . . brilliant, eccentric and moving - an immersion in life . . . this enigmatic book is written out of what cannot be fathomed.' Observer

'If there is a more beautifully observed examination of the weightlessness, silence, rigour and delight of what it means to swim, I've never read it.' David Rakoff, author ofHalf Empty