All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess

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

"Bracing and brilliant . . . The iconoclastic US author's intellectually poised critique of minimalism boasts scintillating writing of breadth and power. . . . Rothfeld writes where devils fear to tread--about sex, beauty and desire and about consumption and consummation. . . . Becca Rothfeld is a dynamo."
--The Guardian

"All Things Are Too Small . . . is splendidly immodest in its neo-Romantic agenda--to tear down minimalism and puritanism in its many current varieties . . . Rothfeld makes her strongest case in her essays' very form, a carnival of high-low allusion and analysis . . . [an] exhilarating ride."
--The New York Times

"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, starred review

"The writing is crisp, reflecting a curious mind and a yearning body."
--Kirkus

"Shrewd . . . The arguments here are delivered with gusto and delight, and eagerly invite heat of disagreement."
--The Wall Street Journal

"This is a radical and important book. Along with the brilliance of the prose and the range of consideration, there is the steady coherence of Becca Rothfeld's argument: in these essays, she stages passionate duels between egalitarianism and distinction, abstinence and appetite, control and disproportion, and wins the battle, beautifully and eloquently, for the side of expansiveness and mess and desire. It's a thrilling struggle, thrillingly prosecuted."
--James Wood, author of Serious Noticing: Selected Essays

"In this brilliant debut, Becca Rothfeld dismantles our assumptions about politics and culture, urging us to embrace restorative excess in place of a meagre (and mistaken, in her view) puritanical asceticism. All Things Are Too Small is a riveting book from one of our subtlest critics."
--Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom

"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 (most recently) 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

"Becca Rothfeld has an unsparing wit, a crystalline style, and a berserk appetite; she is not only one of America's most invariably interesting young cultural critics, but among our most generous and profound perverts. All Things Are Too Small is both a tribute to surplus and a seigneurial example of it--each essay here overspills its banks into the next, and the book sums to a rich, dazzling, and nonetheless precise entertainment."
--Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction