All Things Are Too Small

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349016245

Price: £10.99

ON SALE: 3rd April 2025

Genre: Cultural Studies / Literary Essays

Select a format:

ebook

Disclosure: If you buy products using the retailer buttons above, we may earn a commission from the retailers you visit.

From one of the most talented young thinkers in the US, a warm, funny and intellectually dazzling call for excess, ecstasy and disorder in an age of sterility and minimalism

TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024
NEW YORK TIMES‘ 100 MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2024

‘Scintillating writing of breadth and power’ Observer

‘Seriously precise and very funny’ Telegraph

‘A radical and important book’ James Wood

Our culture’s embrace of minimalism and uniformity has left our souls impoverished. Decluttering has reduced our living spaces to empty non-places; the mindfulness trend has emptied our minds of the thoughts that make us who we are; and the regularization of sex has drained it of unpredictability and therefore true eroticism.

In an age of oppressive sterility and limitation, All Things Are Too Small is a refreshing and much-needed tonic: a soul cry for derangement, imbalance, obsession, ravishment and disorder.

Reviews

Rothfeld is both a seriously precise writer and a very funny one ... All Things Are Too Small vibrates with good phrases and perspicacious analysis
Telegraph
Rothfeld is unexpected, intelligent, engaging - and clearly delights in her task ... She is a precise, dynamic critic and her personal writing is vivid and insightful
New Statesman
Piquant . . . Rothfeld applies an incisive lens to everything from decluttering and fasting to mindfulness
New Yorker
The drama of reading Rothfeld is primarily―thrillingly―intellectual . . . Having just recovered from a dazzling insight, we might be provoked to argue with her (one can imagine she likes it that way), and we are never bored
Washington Post
Brims over with opulent sentences that are an indulgence in their own right
AnOther Magazine
Astonishing, scalpel-sharp ... if intelligent, skilful criticism is its own moral imperative, then All Things Are Too Small provides a commendable model for how it might be enacted
Review 31
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
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
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
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, author of Antiquities
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 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
Iconoclastic ... Rothfeld's range of reference - from Moby-Dick to Troll 2 - is immense, as is her intelligence, though it's all leavened by a wonderful sense of humour
Prospect, Books of the Year
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, author of Redeployment
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
New York Times
Bracing and brilliant ... scintillating writing of breadth and power
Kate Kellaway, Observer
Shrewd . . . The arguments here are delivered with gusto and delight, and eagerly invite heat of disagreement
Wall Street Journal
Becca Rothfeld expresses her unmatched passion for life in a fearless, vivid criticism of all our attempts to dumb it down. Her pleasure in thinking is so infectious, her appetite so generous, that she puts to shame those cynical ethics which masquerade as rigour. This book shows us that interrogation is a brilliant form of gusto.
Lillian Fishman, author of Acts of Service