Description Hide Description- Show Description+
A bold, provocative collection of essays by a Pulitzer winner on one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?
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?
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?
Author: Andrea Long Chu
Hardback Published 2 September 2025 288 pages
A galaxy-brain-level thinker... Within these pages is the best salon in contemporary America.- Torrey Peters, PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of Detransition, Baby
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