Authority: Essays on Being Right

By Andrea Long Chu

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?

Hardback book.
288 pages.

Published by Cornerstone.