Description

This highly anticipated book by the Pulitzer Prize winning critic Andrea Long Chu asks one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?

‘A rigorous thinker armed with a killer turn of phrase’
Observer

‘Her writing is razor-sharp, personal, and vociferous in its proclamations, but it’s also fun – it’s got bite’
New Statesman

‘Fun reading’
Guardian

‘A galaxy-brain-level thinker’ Torrey Peters

‘One of the most charismatic and original thinkers at work today’ Brandon Taylor

‘Thrilling… Authority reminds us we haven’t yet felt all there is to feel’ Kaveh Akbar

‘A pure joy to read’ Claire Dederer
Since her canonical 2017 essay ‘On Liking Women’, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as one of the most provocative, funny, brilliant and stylish critics at work today. 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. As a critic, 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; teases out the ideology behind Hillary Clinton’s (fictional) sex life; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism.

The unifying theme of the book is authority and taste in literature, art, culture and politics: how do we decide what’s good, and how do we convince others that our judgement is correct?

Publisher Review

A critic for right now–and for the ages. Authority is, all at once, a dizzyingly smart challenge, a call to action, and a pure joy to read. * Claire Dederer, author of Monsters * Andrea Long Chu is one of the most charismatic and original thinkers at work today. These essays made me want to call a friend and get into an argument-about literature, about culture, about life. * Brandon Taylor, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Real Life * Provocative, beautiful and addictive… I couldn’t stop reading. — Angela Saini, author of The Patriarchs Zadie Smith once said that what is admirable about Didion isn’t the style, but ‘the authority. The authority of tone.’ I feel the same about Andrea Long Chu. So much authority, precision and originality – what a motivational, and joyful read, from start to finish. * Lou Stoppard * In an era of ethical infantilization, shitty cynicisms, and limpid rhetorical hygienics, Chu names exactly, irreducibly, what she sees and feels and believes… Like all truly great works of criticism, Authority makes remaining alive feel not just possible but worthwhile. It reminds us we haven’t yet felt all there is to feel. * Kaveh Akbar, author of the New York Times bestseller Martyr! * Reading Andrea Long Chu is always an exhortation to dismantle some authority–outer, inner, or usually both. The writing is triggering, exhilarating, and illuminating. She demands we think counterintuitively, radically, and exactingly, with paradoxical precision and irreverent urgency. This collection coalesces around the dialectic of freedom and authority-and shows us that challenging this binary is vital to us as thinkers, readers and citizens. * Lexi Freiman, author of The Book of Ayn * One of the most exciting critics working today. * New York Magazine * [Females] is always smart, sometimes sincere, and unpredictable about when it will pinch your arm or clutch its nails around your heart. * VICE on Females * Among our most original thinkers on gender. * The Week * At the level of the sentence?one of my favorite levels?Chu is hard to match. She can be biting, and she can be beautiful. She can make language do anything she wants without even breaking a sweat * Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post *