Reader Score
75%
75% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 6 reviews on
A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as mindfulness, decluttering, David Cronenberg, and consent.
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.
Named one of the most anticipated books of 2024 by Lit Hub
"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
"Bracing and brilliant . . . The iconoclastic US author's intellectually poised critique of minimalism boasts scintillating writing of breadth and power. . . . Rothfeld writes where devils fear to tread--about sex, beauty and desire and about consumption and consummation. . . . Becca Rothfeld is a dynamo."
--The Guardian
"Shrewd . . . The arguments here are delivered with gusto and delight, and eagerly invite heat of disagreement."
--The Wall Street Journal
"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 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."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review