Authority

Essays

De: Andrea Long Chu

Narrado por: Andrea Long Chu

Read by the author, this bold, provocative collection of essays asks one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?

Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers. Authority brings together Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama; questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butler’s science fiction as a parable of slavery; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism.

Criticism today is having a crisis of authority—but so says every generation of critics. In two magisterial new essays, Chu offers a revised intellectual history of this perennial crisis, tracing the surprisingly political contours of criticism from its origins in the Enlightenment to our present age of social media. Rather than succumbing to an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the genuine crises, from authoritarianism to genocide, that confront us today.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Incisive, because books are of this world

Andrea wants more. More out of books, of stories, of ideas. Her overarching message of these pieces is splendid: freedom is not about saying what we want, but taking what you are saying as an act from you: What you're saying means something to everyone. Commit to it, and let others hold it in their own lights.

Her book reviews are fantastic

The other essays were hit or miss, thus 3 stars. 5 stars for all of the book reviews. You don’t need to have read the book she’s reviewing to love them!