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Is There God after Prince?

Dispatches from an Age of Last Things
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( 33 ratings, 9 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Is There God after Prince? is a collection of lyrical essays by Peter Coviello that explores what it means to love art, culture, and people amid the sense of an impending disaster. The book weaves together reflections on films, TV shows, poems, novels, and songs—from The Shining and The Sopranos to works by Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, and Prince—set against vivid moments of friendship, loss, and everyday life. Coviello confronts the feeling of “endstrickenness,” probing how cherished cultural objects sustain us through turbulent times and illuminate the joys and sorrows of contemporary existence.
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book will resonate with readers who appreciate thoughtful cultural criticism, fans of contemporary essays, and anyone interested in exploring how art and love persist in challenging times.

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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Essays considering what it means to love art, culture, and people in an age of accelerating disaster.

This is a book about loving things—books, songs, people—in the shadow of a felt, looming disaster. Through lyrical, funny, heart-wrenching essays, Peter Coviello considers pieces of culture across a fantastic range, setting them inside the vivid scenes of friendship, dispute, romance, talk, and loss, where they enter our lives. Alongside him, we reencounter movies like The Shining, shows like The Sopranos; videos; poems; novels by Sam Lipsyte, Sally Rooney, and Paula Fox; as well as songs by Joni Mitchell, Gladys Knight, Steely Dan, Pavement, and the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, Prince.

Navigating an overwhelming feeling that Coviello calls “endstrickenness,” he asks what it means to love things in calamitous times, when so much seems to be shambling toward collapse. Balancing comedy and anger, exhilaration and sorrow, Coviello illuminates the strange ways the things we cherish help us to hold on to life and to its turbulent joys. Is There God after Prince? shows us what twenty-first-century criticism can be, and how it might speak to us, in a time of ruin, in an age of “Last Things.”

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Sam Lipsyte, acclaimed author, praises Coviello as a "bard of ardor" who offers "beautiful demonstrations" of passionate engagement with art and life. Lipsyte remarks that though the world feels ready to "close up shop," Coviello's essays show that vibrancy and new meaning remain attainable.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780226828084

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 06 October 2023

Country: United States

Imprint: University of Chicago Press

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 140.0mm

Height: 216.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 304

About the Author

Peter Coviello is the author of five previous books, including Tomorrow's Parties, a finalist for a 2013 Lambda Award in LGBT Studies; Long Players, a memoir selected as one of Artforum's Ten Best Books of 2018; and Make Yourselves Gods, also published by the University of Chicago Press. His essays have appeared in Frieze, Chicago Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Raritan, Elle, and Believer, among other publications. He is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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