Hi, I'm Becca. I am the non-fiction book critic of the Washington Post, an editor at The Point, and a contributing editor at The Boston Review . My essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, was published Metropolitan Books in the US and Virago in the UK in April 2024. The New York Times called it "splendidly immodest" and "exhilarating" and The Guardian called it "bracing and brilliant." It was a New York Times editors' pick and a New Yorker weekly recommendation. It was also one of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, one of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2024, one of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2024, one of Mother Jones's Best Books We Read This Year, one of the Prospect's Books of the Year, and one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Non-Fiction from 2024. Finally, I am also a PhD candidate (on indefinite hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard, but i remain perhaps delusionally convinced that someday I will finish my dissertation. These days I live in Washington, DC, with this person, whom I love. Here you can find all of my Washington Post pieces, which will come out each week, generally speaking.
To keep up with my writing/rantings, subscribe to my substack here. As a writer: I have contributed essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review to publications like The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Liberties, Bookforum, Art in America, The Yale Review, The Baffler, and more. These days, I write mostly for the Washington Post about non-fiction, but occasionally I write essays on fiction and whatever else for other venues. I am the winner of the first annual Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism (see more here) and the 2023 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing (see more here). In 2017, I was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the essays/criticism category. A few authors I especially love are Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, Henry James, Henry Green, Heinrich von Kleist, Marie de France, and Norman Rush. My agent is Anna Sproul-Latimer of Neon Literary. As a (lapsed?) philosopher: I am primarily interested in aesthetics (especially aesthetic value and its relationship to other types of value), the philosophy of love and sex, and the history of German philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger, although I have increasingly consuming secondary interests in political philosophy. In "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," published in The British Journal of Aesthetics, I defend aestheticism, the view that aesthetic value is sometimes a partial grounds of moral value. I describe aestheticism in more detail in a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art. If I ever get around to completing it, my dissertation will be about some combination of the following: what it is to be a beautiful person, why evolutionary psychologists are wrong about human beauty, the ethics of exclusionary romantic/sexual/aesthetic preferences, and what role the state should play in ameliorating inequitable distributions of intimate "goods." I hold a first-class MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a B.A., summa cum laude with high honors, from Dartmouth College, where I studied philosophy & German (and cultivated an enduring distaste for fraternities). I receive many emails asking for advice about graduate school applications. I have answered some frequently asked questions on this page. As I note there, I do not consider myself an expert in how to write a successful graduate school application, and I urge all prospective grad students to consult resources online, as well as supervisors who have served on admissions committees, rather than me! Before the pandemic, I followed Hegel in regarding nature as geistlos, but now, like any good Heideggerian, I am a big fan of hiking. Here I am in the Berkshires, which I love
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I have read Lolita differently at different times in my life. At first I read it flat-footedly, just as an object of dazzling beauty. I must have found it on my parents’ shelves, where I often foraged for reading on nights when I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t grasp much of what I grappled with in my fits of insomnia, both because everything passed through the gauze of my stale exhaustion and because most of my parents’ books described a world I could not yet imagine. I had just survived the seventh grade, and for months the greatest trial in my life had been the weekly bar and bat mitzvahs I dreaded but could not, on pain of rudeness, avoid. Week after week, I shifted in shoes that pinched my feet. On the sole disastrous occasion when I consented to a slow dance, my partner told me I rocked back and forth too violently, as in fact I had. It had yet to occur to me that I could be an object of sexual interest to anyone, probably because I, by dint of my glow-in-the-dark retainer and the attendant spittle I spewed whenever I spoke with enthusiasm, was emphatically not an object of sexual interest to anyone at the time....Read more here or in print.
8 Comments
Your essay, "The Real Lolita," offers a profound and multifaceted exploration of Nabokov's work, delving into the evolving perceptions one experiences with each reading. Your candid reflections on how personal growth and societal movements, such as #MeToo, influence our interpretation of literature are both insightful and timely. By addressing the tension between the novel's aesthetic brilliance and its unsettling subject matter, you invite readers to engage in a deeper, more nuanced dialogue about art and morality. Thank you for contributing such a thoughtful and courageous perspective to the literary discourse. Becca Rothfeld's essay "The Real Lolita" in The Point offers a nuanced and deeply personal exploration of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Her candid reflections on how her perception of the novel has evolved over time provide a compelling framework for readers to reconsider their own interpretations. Rothfeld's ability to intertwine literary analysis with introspective narrative enriches the discourse surrounding this complex work. Her insights not only illuminate the multifaceted nature of Lolita but also underscore the transformative power of literature in shaping our understanding of art and morality. Becca Rothfeld's essay, "The Real Lolita," offers a deeply introspective and nuanced exploration of how personal experiences and maturity shape one's interpretation of literature. Her candid reflections on revisiting Nabokov's Lolita at different stages of her life illuminate the evolving complexities of reader response. Rothfeld's eloquent prose and philosophical insights not only enrich the discourse surrounding this controversial novel but also invite readers to contemplate their own literary journeys. Her ability to intertwine personal narrative with critical analysis makes this piece both compelling and thought-provoking. 4/18/2025 06:30:51 pm
Wow, what a nice article. You can be sure that I will visit you frequently from now on. 5/6/2025 10:03:55 pm
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