All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024
NEW YORK TIMES' 100 MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2024'Bracing and brilliant ... scintillating writing of breadth and power' Kate Kellaway, Observer'A radical and important book' James Wood, author of Serious NoticingSeriously precise ... and very funny' TelegraphIn All Things Are Too Small, virtuoso young critic and philosopher Becca Rothfeld turns her clear gaze to a series of interconnected cultural and political questions - about aesthetics, taste, literature, equality, power and sexuality. In a healthy culture, she argues, economic security allows for wild extremes of aesthetic experimentation, yet in our society we've got it flipped. The gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, while we compensate with misguided attempts to effect equality in love and art, where it does not belong.Our culture's embrace of minimalism has left our souls impoverished: decluttering has reduced our living spaces to empty non-places; the mindfulness trend has emptied our minds of the thoughts that make us who we are; the regularization of sex has drained it of unpredictability and therefore true eroticism; and our quest for balance has yielded fictions whose protagonists aspire to excise their appetites. As intellectually illuminating as it is gloriously carnal and earthy, All Things Are Too Small is a much needed tonic in a world of oppressive sterility and limitation, and a soul cry for derangement, imbalance, obsession, ravishment and disorder.A finalist for a National Magazine Award and a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian reviewing prize, Becca Rothfeld is an essayist, critic, editor, and philosopher. She has written for publications like The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, The Nation, The New Republic, AGNI, Cabinet, The Point, The Yale Review, and many others. On hiatus from a Philosophy PhD at Harvard, she is currently non-fiction book critic at The Washington Post and an editor at The Point.
Author: Becca Rothfeld
Format: Hardback, 304 pages, 140mm x 218mm, 407 g
Published: 2024, Little, Brown Book Group, United Kingdom
Genre: Anthologies, Essays, Letters & Miscellaneous
TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024
NEW YORK TIMES' 100 MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2024'Bracing and brilliant ... scintillating writing of breadth and power' Kate Kellaway, Observer'A radical and important book' James Wood, author of Serious NoticingSeriously precise ... and very funny' TelegraphIn All Things Are Too Small, virtuoso young critic and philosopher Becca Rothfeld turns her clear gaze to a series of interconnected cultural and political questions - about aesthetics, taste, literature, equality, power and sexuality. In a healthy culture, she argues, economic security allows for wild extremes of aesthetic experimentation, yet in our society we've got it flipped. The gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, while we compensate with misguided attempts to effect equality in love and art, where it does not belong.Our culture's embrace of minimalism has left our souls impoverished: decluttering has reduced our living spaces to empty non-places; the mindfulness trend has emptied our minds of the thoughts that make us who we are; the regularization of sex has drained it of unpredictability and therefore true eroticism; and our quest for balance has yielded fictions whose protagonists aspire to excise their appetites. As intellectually illuminating as it is gloriously carnal and earthy, All Things Are Too Small is a much needed tonic in a world of oppressive sterility and limitation, and a soul cry for derangement, imbalance, obsession, ravishment and disorder.A finalist for a National Magazine Award and a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian reviewing prize, Becca Rothfeld is an essayist, critic, editor, and philosopher. She has written for publications like The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, The Nation, The New Republic, AGNI, Cabinet, The Point, The Yale Review, and many others. On hiatus from a Philosophy PhD at Harvard, she is currently non-fiction book critic at The Washington Post and an editor at The Point.