Olivia Laing is out with their latest, The Silver Book (FSG), a queer love story and noirish thriller set in the world of Italian cinema in the 1970s. “I wrote The Silver Book while living in Rome, immersing myself in the city and trying to time-travel back to 1975, when the film directors Pasolini and Fellini walked the streets,” Laing explains via e-mail. “I wrote it in a feverish two-and-a-half months, charged up on the city’s wild energy.” It is about (real) Academy Award–winning costume designer Danilo Donati and a (fictional) English artist, Nicholas, who becomes his apprentice and lover. Readers see the two at work on sets and wardrobe for Federico Fellini’s Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salò,” against the backdrop of legendary film studio Cinecittà in Rome–and Pasol

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