All Things Are Too Small, Becca Rothfeld
All Things Are Too Small, Becca Rothfeld
List: $34.99 | Sale: $24.50
Club: $17.49

All Things Are Too Small
Essays in Praise of Excess

Author: Becca Rothfeld

Narrator: Ruth Crawford

Unabridged: 10 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/28/2024

Synopsis

A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as decluttering, mindfulness, David Cronenberg, sadomasochism, and women who wait. All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural and literary critic Becca Rothfeld’s plea for derangement: imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment in all domains of life, from literature to romance. In a healthy culture, Rothfeld argues, economic security allows for wild aesthetic experimentation and excess, yet in our contemporary world, we’ve got it flipped. The gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, while we compensate with misguided attempts to effect equality in love and art, where it does not belong. Rothfeld shows how our culture’s embrace of minimalism has left us spiritually impoverished: how decluttering has reduced our living spaces to vacant non-places; how the mindfulness trend has emptied our minds of the musings, thoughts, and obsessions that make us who we are; how the regularization of sex has drained it of unpredictability and therefore true eroticism; and how our craze for balance has yielded fictions with protagonists who aspire, stylistically and substantively, to excise their appetites. With uncompromising intellect, exuberance, and sly humor, Rothfeld insists that in culture, imbalance functions as a catapult, transforming our stagnant beliefs and identities. For culture to change, she says, it must bulge and binge.

About Becca Rothfeld

Becca Rothfeld has received the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Prize for Criticism as well as the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism. She is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post, and editor at The Point, as well as a PhD candidate (on long hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard, an essayist, critic, editor, and philosopher. She has written for The New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Art in America, and the Baffler. She lives with her two dogs and husband in Washington, DC.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Nathan on February 07, 2025

Obsessed with this. I couldn’t stop. I keep telling myself to savor jt, it’ll be even better if it last longer, but I couldn’t stop myself from spending my entire day with it (and texting several friends pictures of passages to entice them to do the same). If you have a friend that you want to do an......more

Goodreads review by Charlotte on August 30, 2023

As a longtime admirer of Rothfeld’s criticism, this book was a highly anticipated read for me. This excitement dimmed slightly through the opening essays, where Rothfeld aims to situate the thesis of the text (as stated in the subtitle of the book: a “praise of excess”) in the political writings of......more

Goodreads review by Ella on April 08, 2024

I’d read some of Rothfeld’s articles and appreciated her outsider position on some popular topics, like Sally Rooney’s novels, so when I won an ARC for this book through Goodreads, I was excited. Unfortunately, when I spent a protracted length of time with her writing, it became clear that her ideas......more

Goodreads review by Elle on June 30, 2024

I think that Rothfeld is at her best here when she writes about sex – her work on sex as transformation in her Cronenberg essays and on the ethics of sex beyond simply consent in “Only Mercy” are each brilliant. The Flesh, It Makes You Crazy, a celebration of the ravenous pleasure of desire, even as......more

Goodreads review by Yan on May 05, 2024

the writing is super competent and rothfeld is obviously super bright (which she does REALLY want you to know), but i guess my main gripe is that i don’t really think the essays are what the book advertises? like an essay about mindhunter or mindfulness meditation—despite however tenuously you may w......more

Quotes

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.

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List