A brilliant collection of critical essays by Mark Greif, founding editor of n+1—now in paperback.

The essays collected in Against Everything address such key topics in the cultural and intellectual life of our time as the tyranny of exercise, the tyranny of nutrition and food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of Radiohead, the rise and fall of the hipster, the impact of the Occupy movement, and the crisis of policing. Each essay is learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious. They are the work of a young intellectual who, with his peers, is reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. An important contribution to the higher mental life of our vexed time.

Praise for Against Everything

“Mark Greif writes a contrarian, skeptical prose that is at the same time never cynical: it opens out on to beauty and the possibility of change.”
—Zadie Smith

“Mark Greif’s book proposes the impossible thing, a phenomenology of the present─at a moment in which the present is slipping by so fast that anything we dare call that is already signed, sealed and delivered to the past . . . It is wonderful reading which cuts into the present before the latter disappears.”
—Fredric Jameson

“I love Mark Greif. No living essayist effects the destruction of everything other people hold dear with a lighter or more elegant touch. An unmitigated delight.”
—Elif Batuman

320 pages.