India, June 13 -- In the critically acclaimed The Lonely City (2017), the writer Olivia Laing extolled the pleasures as well as the pains of loneliness, identifying loneliness as a creative enterprise as well as a manifestation of a particular urban identity. Laing illustrates beautifully the paradoxical situation of loneliness in the modern urban landscape, where one is theoretically closer to others, yet also anonymized and placeless. She links her personal story of loneliness in a vast city to works of modern art, including the anonymity of the self in the work of the American realist painter and printmaker Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Hopper's representations of modern American life, of solitary figures in a hotel lobby or a diner, for ...