Join us at the Seminary Co-op bookstore in Hyde Park, Chicago, for a book event in celebration of the publication of Point editor Becca Rothfeld’s debut essay collection, All Things Are Too Small. A conversation between the author and Agnes Callard will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.
About the author
Becca Rothfeld has received the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Prize for Criticism as well as the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism. She is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post and an editor at The Point, as well as a Ph.D. candidate (on long hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard, an essayist, critic, editor, and philosopher. She has written for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Art in America, and the Baffler. She lives with her two dogs and husband in Washington, D.C.
About the book
In her debut essay collection, “brilliant and stylish” (the Washington Post) critic Becca Rothfeld takes on one of the most sacred cows of our time: the demand that we apply the virtues of equality and democracy to culture and aesthetics. The result is a culture that is flattened and sanitized, purged of ugliness, excess, and provocation.
Our embrace of minimalism has left us spiritually impoverished. We see it in our homes, where we bring in Marie Kondo to rid them of their idiosyncrasies and darknesses. We take up mindfulness to do the same thing to our heads, emptying them of the musings, thoughts, and obsessions that make us who we are. In the bedroom, a new wave of puritanism has drained sex of its unpredictability and therefore true eroticism. In our fictions, the quest for balance has given us protagonists who aspire only to excise their appetites. We have flipped our values, Rothfeld argues: while the gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, we strive to compensate with egalitarianism in art, erotics, and taste, where it does not belong and where it quashes wild experiments and exuberance.
Lush, provocative, and bitingly funny, All Things Are Too Small is a subversive soul cry to restore imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment to all domains of our lives.
Accessibility: The event will be fully wheelchair accessible.
Join us at the Seminary Co-op bookstore in Hyde Park, Chicago, for a book event in celebration of the publication of Point editor Becca Rothfeld’s debut essay collection, All Things Are Too Small. A conversation between the author and Agnes Callard will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.
About the author
Becca Rothfeld has received the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Prize for Criticism as well as the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism. She is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post and an editor at The Point, as well as a Ph.D. candidate (on long hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard, an essayist, critic, editor, and philosopher. She has written for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Art in America, and the Baffler. She lives with her two dogs and husband in Washington, D.C.
About the book
In her debut essay collection, “brilliant and stylish” (the Washington Post) critic Becca Rothfeld takes on one of the most sacred cows of our time: the demand that we apply the virtues of equality and democracy to culture and aesthetics. The result is a culture that is flattened and sanitized, purged of ugliness, excess, and provocation.
Our embrace of minimalism has left us spiritually impoverished. We see it in our homes, where we bring in Marie Kondo to rid them of their idiosyncrasies and darknesses. We take up mindfulness to do the same thing to our heads, emptying them of the musings, thoughts, and obsessions that make us who we are. In the bedroom, a new wave of puritanism has drained sex of its unpredictability and therefore true eroticism. In our fictions, the quest for balance has given us protagonists who aspire only to excise their appetites. We have flipped our values, Rothfeld argues: while the gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, we strive to compensate with egalitarianism in art, erotics, and taste, where it does not belong and where it quashes wild experiments and exuberance.
Lush, provocative, and bitingly funny, All Things Are Too Small is a subversive soul cry to restore imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment to all domains of our lives.
Accessibility: The event will be fully wheelchair accessible.