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

• Lillian Fishman, author of Acts of Service

  Becca Rothfeld expresses her unmatched passion for life in a fearless, vivid criticism of all our attempts to dumb it down. Her pleasure in thinking is so infectious, her appetite so generous, that she puts to shame those cynical ethics which masquerade as rigour. This book shows us that interrogation is a brilliant form of gusto.

• Kate Kellaway

  Observer

  Bracing and brilliant ... scintillating writing of breadth and power

• Telegraph

  Rothfeld is both a seriously precise writer and a very funny one ... All Things Are Too Small vibrates with good phrases and perspicacious analysis

• AnOther Magazine

  Brims over with opulent sentences that are an indulgence in their own right

• New Statesman

  Rothfeld is unexpected, intelligent, engaging - and clearly delights in her task ... She is a precise, dynamic critic and her personal writing is vivid and insightful

• Review 31

  Astonishing, scalpel-sharp ... if intelligent, skilful criticism is its own moral imperative, then All Things Are Too Small provides a commendable model for how it might be enacted

• New York Times

  Splendidly immodest in its neo-Romantic agenda―to tear down minimalism and puritanism in its many current varieties . . . Rothfeld makes her strongest case in her essays' very form, a carnival of high-low allusion and analysis . . . [an] exhilarating ride

• New Yorker

  Piquant . . . Rothfeld applies an incisive lens to everything from decluttering and fasting to mindfulness

• Washington Post

  The drama of reading Rothfeld is primarily―thrillingly―intellectual . . . Having just recovered from a dazzling insight, we might be provoked to argue with her (one can imagine she likes it that way), and we are never bored

• Wall Street Journal

  Shrewd . . . The arguments here are delivered with gusto and delight, and eagerly invite heat of disagreement

• Kirkus

  The writing is crisp, reflecting a curious mind and a yearning body

• Publishers Weekly, starred review

  Rothfeld has a knack for aphorism ('There is nothing more foreign to justice than love'), and it's an absolute pleasure to watch her idiosyncratic arguments unfold. This is a triumph

• Prospect, Books of the Year

  Iconoclastic ... Rothfeld's range of reference - from Moby-Dick to Troll 2 - is immense, as is her intelligence, though it's all leavened by a wonderful sense of humour