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Essays
by Andrea Long Chu
A bold, provocative collection of essays on one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?
Since her canonical 2017 essay "On Liking Women," the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers. Authority brings together Chu's critical work across a wide range of media―novels, television, theater, video games―as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama; questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butler's science fiction as a parable of slavery; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism.
Criticism today is having a crisis of authority―but so says every generation of critics. In two magisterial new essays, Chu offers a revised intellectual history of this perennial crisis, tracing the surprisingly political contours of criticism from its origins in the Enlightenment to our present age of social media. Rather than succumbing to an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the genuine crises, from authoritarianism to genocide, that confront us today.
"Intellectually rigorous and lucidly argued, this affirms Chu's status as one of the most incisive critics working today." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Acerbic social and cultural critique." —Kirkus Reviews
This information about Authority was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females was published in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, the New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, and Jewish Currents.
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