Against Everything

Against Everything

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

About the author

Mark Greif received a BA summa cum laude from Harvard in history and literature and an MPhil from Oxford in English as a British Marshall Scholar. In 2004, he co-founded the literary and intellectual journal n+1 in New York and has been a principal at the magazine since then. He earned a PhD in American studies from Yale in 2007. Since 2008, he has been on the faculty of the New School in New York, where he is currently an associate professor. His previous book, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973, was published in 2015. Greif has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.