Becca Rothfeld – författare

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 minimalismTIME MAGAZINE''S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024NEW YORK TIMES'' 100 MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2024PROSPECT BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2024''Scintillating writing of breadth and power'' Observer''Seriously precise and very funny'' Telegraph''A radical and important book'' James WoodOur culture''s embrace of minimalism and uniformity 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; and the regularization of sex has drained it of unpredictability and therefore true eroticism.In an age of oppressive sterility and limitation, All Things Are Too Small is a refreshing and much-needed tonic: a soul cry for derangement, imbalance, obsession, ravishment and disorder.

A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as mindfulness, decluttering, David Cronenberg, and consent.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.