Becca Rothfeld
  • About
  • BOOK
  • Selected Writing
    • Essays
    • Mostly Literary But Some Art Criticism
    • Juvenilia
  • CV
  • Contact
  • GRAD SCHOOL APP ADVICE
  • About
  • BOOK
  • Selected Writing
    • Essays
    • Mostly Literary But Some Art Criticism
    • Juvenilia
  • CV
  • Contact
  • GRAD SCHOOL APP ADVICE


MY FIRST BOOK, ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL: ESSAYS IN PRAISE OF EXCESS, WAS PUBLISHED ON APRIL 2 BY METROPOLITAN BOOKS

Named 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 Prospect's Best Books of the Year, and one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Non-Fiction from 2024.


obligatory review barrage (sorry):
“What Rothfeld has that I find missing in many other writers of her generation is an abiding critical vision, some rock-solid belief that informs everything she does… Reading her sometimes reminds me of what it felt like… to first encounter Pauline Kael’s work… With both writers the bravado and slangy conversational tone are grounded in an aesthetic of amplitude, a view that art touches on life in multiple ways.”
—Jed Perl, The New York Review of Books
"Bracing and brilliant... The iconclastic US author's intellectually poised critique of minimalism boasts scintillating writing of breath and power"
-The Guardian

"All Things Are Too Small . . . is splendidly immodest in its neo-Romantic agenda―to tear down minimalism and puritanism in its many current varieties . . . Rothfeld makes her strongest case in her essays’ very form, a carnival of high-low allusion and analysis . . . [an] exhilarating ride."
―The New York Times

"All Things Are Too Small is an exuberant, moving, and ultimately persuasive argument for giving desire, whether in love or in art, its due. That is, for taking the risk that desire might, indeed, un-do us, and that this undoing might be worth the price."
―The Millions

Rothfeld, meanwhile, is both a seriously precise writer and a very funny one. All Things Are Too Small vibrates with good phrases and perspicacious analysis.
-The Telegraph

The drama of reading Rothfeld is primarily — thrillingly — intellectual... Having just recovered from a dazzling insight, we might be provoked to argue with her (one can imagine she likes it that way), and we are never bored.
-The Washington Post

Rothfeld has a knack for aphorism... and it’s an absolute pleasure to watch her idiosyncratic arguments unfold. This is a triumph.
-Publisher's Weekly (starred review)


obligatory blurb barrage (sorry):

"This is a radical and important book. Along with the brilliance of the prose and the range of consideration, there is the steady coherence of Becca Rothfeld's argument: in these essays, she stages passionate duels between egalitarianism and distinction, abstinence and appetite, control and disproportion, and wins the battle, beautifully and eloquently, for the side of expansiveness and mess and desire. It's a thrilling struggle, thrillingly prosecuted."
--James Wood, author of Serious Noticing: Selected Essays

"In this brilliant debut, Becca Rothfeld dismantles our assumptions about politics and culture, urging us to embrace restorative excess in place of a meagre (and mistaken, in her view) puritanical asceticism. All Things Are Too Small is a riveting book from one of our subtlest critics."
--Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom

"Becca Rothfeld, one of our finest critics, writes with the boldly sensuous lyricism of DH Lawrence and the pugnacious brilliance of Irving Howe. In All Things Are Too Small ideas sing, jostle, sweat and brawl. In no other writer is the life of the mind such a raucous, exhilarating joy."
—Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment and Uncertain Ground

"It seemed at one time that the legendary New York intellectuals and the luminaries of Partisan Review were definitively matchless and could have no successors or replicas. Becca Rothfeld alone is refutation: she not only equals their prowess, she ventures beyond their boundaries into queries never before dared or dreamed. There is no aspect of contemporary civilization or literary engagement that eludes her eye and her voice—nor could Lionel Trilling have predicted so elastic a body of insights."
—Cynthia Ozick, NBCC- and PEN-award winning author of (most recently) Antiquities

"These essays spring from a philosopher's voracious, brilliantly synthesizing mind, and from a poet's love for language that leans always toward rapture."
—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness

"Becca Rothfeld has an unsparing wit, a crystalline style, and a berserk appetite; she is not only one of America's most invariably interesting young cultural critics, but among our most generous and profound perverts. All Things Are Too Small is both a tribute to surplus and a seigneurial example of it—each essay here overspills its banks into the next, and the book sums to a rich, dazzling, and nonetheless precise entertainment."
—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction
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TOUR SCHEDULE:
4/2, 6:30PM - McNally Jackson Seaport w/ Phil Klay (New York, NY)
4/3, 7PM - Harvard Book Store w/ James Wood (Cambridge, MA)

4/4, 7PM - Politics and Prose w/ Celeste Marcus (Washington, D.C.) 

4/8, 7PM - Books Are Magic w/ Jon Baskin (Brooklyn, NY)

4/9, 6PM - The Seminary Co-op w/ Agnes Callard (Chicago, IL)

4/10, 6:30PM - Literati w/ Phil Christman (Ann Arbor, MI)
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