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All Things Are Too Small

Essays in Praise of Excess
  • Author
    • Becca Rothfeld
Format
Regular price £16.99
Regular price Sale price £16.99

Anticipated publication date

Apr 04, 2024

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The publication date is an estimated date only and is subject to change.

We anticipate that the book will be published on this date. However, should the estimated publication date change for whatever reason, we will notify you within a reasonable period of time.

What is the relationship between Marie Kondo and many modern novels? Why do we get addicted to stories - particularly when they're about serial killers? Seven years after #metoo, how can we have the sex we really want? Is it ok to think Troll 2 is a good film?

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.

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  • Published: Apr 04 2024
  • Pages: 304
  • ISBN: 9780349016221
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Press Reviews

  • Cynthia Ozick, author of Antiquities

    It seemed at one time that the legendary New York intellectuals and the luminaries of Partisan Review were definitively matchless and could have no successors or replicas. Becca Rothfeld alone is refutation: she not only equals their prowess, she ventures beyond their boundaries into queries never before dared or dreamed. There is no aspect of contemporary civilization or literary engagement that eludes her eye and her voice - nor could Lionel Trilling have predicted so elastic a body of insights
  • Phil Klay, author of Redeployment

    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
  • Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
    These essays spring from a philosopher's voracious, brilliantly synthesizing mind, and from a poet's love for language that leans always toward rapture
  • Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction

    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
  • James Wood, author of Serious Noticing: Selected Essays

    This is a radical and important book. Along with the brilliance of the prose and the range of consideration, there is the steady coherence of Becca Rothfeld's argument: in these essays, she stages passionate duels between egalitarianism and distinction, abstinence and appetite, control and disproportion, and wins the battle, beautifully and eloquently, for the side of expansiveness and mess and desire. It's a thrilling struggle, thrillingly prosecuted
  • Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom

    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