Politics and Prose
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Becca Rothfeld — All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess - with Celeste Marcus
Posted
April 5, 2024
Views
4,925
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April 5, 2024
4,925
53
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37:49Now PlayingWatch author Becca Rothfeld's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.
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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.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post, an editor at the Point, and a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard. Winner of the 2021 Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, finalist for a National Magazine Award, and two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Reviewing Prize, Rothfeld has written for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications. She lives in Washington, DC.
Rothfeld will be in conversation with Celeste Marcus, a writer and artist based in Washington, DC who serves as the managing editor of Liberties Journal. She is currently at work on a biography of Chaim Soutine.
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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.
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