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Authority

Essays on Being Right
By Andrea Long Chu
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Brief 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? "A galaxy-brain-level thinker" - Torrey Peters "One of the most charismatic and original thinkers at... Read More
Format: Hardback
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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?

"A galaxy-brain-level thinker" - Torrey Peters

"One of the most charismatic and original thinkers at work today" - Brandon Taylor

"Thrilling... Authority reminds us we haven't yet felt all there is to feel" - Kaveh Akbar

"A pure joy to read" - Claire Dederer

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 modelling 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, theatre, 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?

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781529155112

Publisher: Cornerstone

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 07 August 2025

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Hutchinson Heinemann

Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 26.0mm

Width: 144.0mm

Height: 224.0mm

Weight: 398g

Pages: 288

Collections

Andrea Long Chu Education & Reference Non-Fiction Penguin Books Science & Nature

About the Author

Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review and Jewish Currents.

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  • Females
    "Everyone is female, and everyone hates it." So begins Andrea Long Chu's genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender, and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas—who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol—Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets...
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  • Females
    “Everyone is female. I mean very simply that everyone wants to be a woman. What one does with this desire is what we call gender.” So begins Andrea Long Chu’s investigation into gender and desire, females and bodies, sex and the self, radical dreams and philosophical pessimisms. Feminism, Chu argues, is an untenable claim, and “when you make an untenable...
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  • Authority
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    Authority
    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? 'A rigorous thinker armed with a killer turn of phrase' Observer 'Her writing is razor-sharp, personal, and vociferous in its proclamations, but it’s also fun – it’s got bite' New...
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