ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL

ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL is a celebration of cultural excess, disproportion, and abandon, as well as a defense of the idea that a healthy society can marry economic and political equality with aesthetic imbalance.

Becca is unafraid to slay sacred cows--see her wickedly smart dissection of the cult of Sally Rooney--but there's much more at work here. Our current cultural focus on moderation, mindfulness, and bland equality above all masks an unwillingness to enforce egalitarianism where it is most needed: in the political and economic realms. Becca's approach is ultimately a form of idealism: she wants to believe in a world where our political and social rights are fundamentally protected, thus freeing up our personal lives and our art to be as operatic, messy, and willfully imbalanced as we choose.

Like FSG author Moira Weigel, who used economic theory to examine how we came to date the ways we do in the widely acclaimed Labor of Love, Becca Rothfeld uses finely honed analytical skills from her background in philosophy and criticism to produce a whip-smart book that's also great fun to read. Jia Tolentino's essays may also come to mind, though Becca has a sharper take on contemporary culture informed by her academic training; she is currently a philosophy PhD candidate at Harvard.

But though Becca's writing is philosophical in spirit, it is also literary, accessible, and engaging. Despite her best attempts to frighten the public away with references to obscure German philosophers (just kidding!), she has received hundreds of fan emails about her work from everyone from rabbis to Princeton professors to teenaged girls. Among her colleagues, her writing has garnered praise from Parul Sehgal, Daniel Mendelsohn, John Williams (The New York Times critic, not author of Stoner), Cynthia Ozick, and more.

A finalist for a National Magazine Award and a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian reviewing prize, Becca Rothfeld is an essayist, critic, editor, and philosopher. She has written about Paul Celan, Bohumil Hrabal, Sally Rooney, Heinrich von Kleist, Bruno Schulz, Simone Weil, internet stalking, Marie Kondo, serial killers, and more for publications like The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, The Nation, The New Republic, AGNI, Cabinet, The Point, The Yale Review, and many others. Her work brings philosophy to bear on both high art and contemporary culture. At Harvard, where she is currently a PhD candidate in philosophy and a fellow at the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, Becca studies the relationship between ethics and aesthetics.