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About Against Everything: Essays
Product Description Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award The essays in Against Everything are learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious, reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. Key topics are the tyranny of exercise, the folly of food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of pop music, the rise and fall of the hipster, the uses of reality TV, the impact of protest movements, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of life—how to find a philosophical stance to adopt toward one’s self and the world. Mark Greif manages to revivify the thought and spirit of the greatest of American dissenters, Henry David Thoreau, for our time and historical situation. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The Guardian • The Atlantic • New York Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • Paris Review • National Post (Canada) Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Diamonson-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The Guardian • The Atlantic • New York Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • Paris Review • Nylon • Literary Hub • Frieze National Book Critics’ Circle Award Finalist New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Diamonson-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay “Susan Sontag was against interpretation. Laura Kipnis was against love. Seven were against Thebes. Mark Greif is against everything... Against Everything is really a book on a single subject: contemporary life, more specifically, the kind of life that someone who would buy such a book, or read a column about such a book—in short, yourself—might right now be living. It’s meant to be consumed from beginning to end. It makes you think...Greif’s argument—and this is what separates him from the usual solver of the times—is that what’s killing us is deeply embedded in our social and economic system. It’s not the gym that’s the problem. It’s the way we live now, which is making the gym seem like a solution to something. Greif thinks that a whole lot will have to change before real choice is possible. Until then, it’s not enough to be against the box-office and the real-estate section and the best-seller list. Until then, we have to be against . . . everything." ⎻⎻ Louis Menand, New Yorker “Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his hand . . . . There is, in truth, nothing that Greif writes that doesn’t have a kernel of interest at its core . . . intriguing . . . embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral and personable. Greif brings to mind a host of critics from William Hazlitt to Lionel Trilling, but most of all he suggests it is possible to write about the culture with a reverence for language and a passion for what has come before. I would read anything he writes, anywhere.” ⎻⎻ Daphne Merkin, The New York Times Book Review “His prose is limpid and plainspoken…. [H]e helps defamiliarize our present moment and points us toward alternate ways of living.… [Greif] wields the forgotten past like a scalpel, cutting away diseased growths to find still-living flesh. In his essays, he seems to ask: Can we find ways of recovering dissent by looking in the least likely places? Can we uncover a buried past of critical opposition?” ⎻⎻ Nicholas Dames, Nation “Greif aligns himself with one of the more neglected traditions of the essay: the highbrow polemic, a vanishing art in an era in which the personal often eclipses the philosophical…. But there’s an untrammeled optimism in being against everything—which, for Greif, entails being for something better than what already exists…. It’s a mark of the thrilling force of Greif’s reasoning, and of his writing’s palpable sincerity, that I, for one, felt justly implicated, absorbed from the start.” ⎻⎻
