All Things Are Too Small

Essays in Praise of Excess

De: Becca Rothfeld

Narrado por: Ruth Crawford

A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as decluttering, mindfulness, David Cronenberg, sadomasochism, and women who wait.

All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural and literary critic Becca Rothfeld’s plea for derangement: imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment in all domains of life, from literature to romance. In a healthy culture, Rothfeld argues, economic security allows for wild aesthetic experimentation and excess, yet in our contemporary world, we’ve got it flipped. The gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, while we compensate with misguided attempts to effect equality in love and art, where it does not belong.

Rothfeld shows how our culture’s embrace of minimalism has left us spiritually impoverished: how decluttering has reduced our living spaces to vacant non-places; how the mindfulness trend has emptied our minds of the musings, thoughts, and obsessions that make us who we are; how the regularization of sex has drained it of unpredictability and therefore true eroticism; and how our craze for balance has yielded fictions with protagonists who aspire, stylistically and substantively, to excise their appetites.

With uncompromising intellect, exuberance, and sly humor, Rothfeld insists that in culture, imbalance functions as a catapult, transforming our stagnant beliefs and identities. For culture to change, she says, it must bulge and binge.

©2024 Becca Rothfeld (P)2024 Dreamscape Media

Reseñas de la Crítica

Named one of the most anticipated books of 2024 by Lit Hub

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)

Incisive and intelligent writing; great narration

Smart, idiosyncratic and self-aware essays on contemporary American culture, narrated with precision and clarity

Insightful and provocative

I loved this book. The author’s points of view on modern subjects were at turns humorous and provocative, but always well informed. The book focuses on lifestyle trends and separates from them those that are personally liberating and empowering from others that only pretend to be.

Smart and clever

A thought provoking, well sourced series of essays. I look forward to more from the author. My only criticism is that the narrator voice doesn't match the content. It should have been read by a millennial type voice. The older vocal tone talking about Instagram stalking took me away from the content a bit. The narrator is truly spectacular and professional, just not for this book.

Boring

I should have read the term paper comment first . It just wasn’t for me and I read mostly non fiction