No Judgement

As a critic, Lauren Oyler has spent a lot of time writing essays that attempt to convince an audience to pay attention to something that could easily be called irrelevant: usually a book. But how do we decide what does matter? If not caring about anything pegs you as a retrograde nihilist, caring too much, about the wrong things, is, at best, embarrassing and uncool; at worst, it may be immoral. What obsesses us is "real" and significant, but the contours of that significance are often blurry; it is easy to confuse care with importance, importance with obligation, particularly when there are apparently rewards for doing so. In this collection of interlinked essays, Oyler explores various modern phenomena - from online arguments, the popularity of #MeToo, autofiction, reality TV, fake news and conspiracy theories - to show how ideas about what is and is not important have shaped culture, how irrelevance can provide freedom as well as madness, and how caring or not caring is rarely a straightforward enterprise.

Préface
A witty, stylish and thought-provoking collection of essays about what how we decide what to care about - from one of America's most exciting young writers

Auteur

Lauren Oyler is the author of the novel Fake Accounts. Her essays on books and culture appear regularly in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, Harper's, the Guardian and other publications. She lives in Berlin.

Texte du rabat

I heard this crazy story, and I want you to know.

It is the age of internet gossip; of social networks, repackaged ideas and rating everything out of five stars. Mega-famous celebrities respond with fury to critics who publish less-than-rapturous reviews of their work (and then delete their tweets); CEOs talk about reclaiming 'the power of vulnerability'; and in the world of fiction, writers eschew actually making things up in favour of 'always just talking about themselves'.

In this blistering, irreverent and very funny first book of non-fiction, Lauren Oyler - one of the most trenchant, influential, and revelatory critics of her generation - takes on the bizarre particularities of our present moment in a series of interconnected essays about literature, the attention economy, gossip, the role of criticism and her own relentless, teeth-grinding anxiety.

Illuminating and thought-provoking, by turns drily scathing and disarmingly open, No Judgement excavates the layers of psychology and meaning in how we communicate, tell stories and make critical judgements - to offer dazzling insights into how we live and think today.