Since her canonical 2017 essay On Liking Women, the Pulitzer Prizewinning 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 Chus critical work across a wide range of medianovels, television, theater, video gamesas 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 Butlers science fiction as a parable of slavery; teases out the ideology behind Hillary Clintons (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?

Format: Hardcover
Published: UK, 2025
Publisher: Cornerstone
Pages: 288
Language: English
ISBN 10: 1529155118
ISBN 13: 9781529155112