No Judgement: On Being Critical

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Description

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.

Author Bio

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.