All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess

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From one of the most talented young thinkers in the US, a warm, funny and intellectually dazzling call for excess, ecstasy and disorder in an age of sterility and minimalism

Reviews

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 * New Statesman *
Bracing and brilliant ... scintillating writing of breadth and power -- Kate Kellaway * Observer *
Rothfeld is both a seriously precise writer and a very funny one ... All Things Are Too Small vibrates with good phrases and perspicacious analysis * Telegraph *
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 -- Cynthia Ozick, author of Antiquities
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
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 -- James Wood, author of Serious Noticing: Selected Essays
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
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. -- Lillian Fishman, author of Acts of Service
Brims over with opulent sentences that are an indulgence in their own right * AnOther Magazine *
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 * Review 31 *
Splendidly immodest in its neo-Romantic agendato 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 York Times *
Piquant . . . Rothfeld applies an incisive lens to everything from decluttering and fasting to mindfulness * New Yorker *
The drama of reading Rothfeld is primarilythrillinglyintellectual . . . 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 * Washington Post *
Shrewd . . . The arguments here are delivered with gusto and delight, and eagerly invite heat of disagreement * Wall Street Journal *
The writing is crisp, reflecting a curious mind and a yearning body * Kirkus *
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 * Publishers Weekly, starred review *
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 * Prospect, Books of the Year *

Author Bio

A finalist for a National Magazine Award and a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian reviewing prize, Becca Rothfeld is an essayist, critic, editor, and philosopher. She has written for publications like The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, The Nation, The New Republic and many others. On hiatus from a Philosophy PhD at Harvard, she is currently non-fiction book critic at The Washington Post and an editor at The Point.