All Things Are Too Small

ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL is a celebration of cultural excess, disproportion, and abandon, as well as a defense of the idea that a healthy society can marry economic and political equality with aesthetic imbalance. Becca is unafraid to slay sacred cows--see her wickedly smart dissection of the cult of Sally Rooney--but there''s much more at work here. Our current cultural focus on moderation, mindfulness, and bland equality above all masks an unwillingness to enforce egalitarianism where it is most needed: in the political and economic realms. Becca''s approach is ultimately a form of idealism: she wants to believe in a world where our political and social rights are fundamentally protected, thus freeing up our personal lives and our art to be as operatic, messy, and willfully imbalanced as we choose.

Préface
From one of the most talented young thinkers in the US, a spiky, funny and intellectually dazzling response to modern culture - from sadomasochism to mindfulness to Sally Rooney

Auteur

Becca Rothfeld

Texte du rabat

'Becca Rothfeld, one of our finest critics, writes with the boldly sensuous lyricism of DH Lawrence and the pugnacious brilliance of Irving Howe. In All Things Are Too Small ideas sing, jostle, sweat and brawl. In no other writer is the life of the mind such a raucous, exhilarating joy'
Phil Klay, author of Redeployment

'These essays spring from a philosopher's voracious, brilliantly synthesizing mind, and from a poet's love for language that leans always toward rapture'
Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness

'Becca Rothfeld has an unsparing wit, a crystalline style, and a berserk appetite; she is not only one of America's most invariably interesting young cultural critics, but among our most generous and profound perverts. All Things Are Too Small is both a tribute to surplus and a seigneurial example of it - each essay here overspills its banks into the next, and the book sums to a rich, dazzling, and nonetheless precise entertainment'
Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction

'In this brilliant debut, Becca Rothfeld dismantles our assumptions about politics and culture, urging us to embrace restorative excess in place of a meagre (and mistaken, in her view) puritanical asceticism. All Things Are too Small is a riveting book from one of our subtlest critics'
Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom

Résumé

A spiky, funny and intellectually dazzling response to modern culture - from BDSM to mindfulness to Sally Rooney

'Bracing and brilliant ... scintillating writing of breadth and power' Kate Kellaway, Observer

'A radical and important book' James Wood, author of Serious Noticing

'Seriously precise ... and very funny' Telegraph

In 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.