Becca Rothfeld at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store and Boston Review welcome BECCA ROTHFELD—nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard—for a discussion of her new book All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. She will be joined in conversation by JAMES WOOD—staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University.

About All Things Are Too Small

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.

Praise for All Things Are Too Small

"Becca Rothfeld, one of our finest critics, writes with the boldly sensuous lyricism of DH Lawrence and the pugnacious brilliance of Irving Howe. In All Things Are Too Small ideas sing, jostle, sweat and brawl. In no other writer is the life of the mind such a raucous, exhilarating joy." ―Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment and Uncertain Ground

"It seemed at one time that the legendary New York intellectuals and the luminaries of Partisan Review were definitively matchless and could have no successors or replicas. Becca Rothfeld alone is refutation: she not only equals their prowess, she ventures beyond their boundaries into queries never before dared or dreamed. There is no aspect of contemporary civilization or literary engagement that eludes her eye and her voice―nor could Lionel Trilling have predicted so elastic a body of insights." ―Cynthia Ozick, NBCC- and PEN-award winning author of Antiquities

"These essays spring from a philosopher's voracious, brilliantly synthesizing mind, and from a poet's love for language that leans always toward rapture." ―Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness

Masking Policy

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.