No book exists in a vacuum, and perhaps no one reviews a book (or TV show, or argument) within the larger context of its creator’s conduct and their entire body of work than Andrea Long Chu, New York magazine critic and winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Her second book, Authority—after her short but well-received work on gender and desire, Females—collects some of her best reviews of books and TV shows, four iconic essays previously published in n+1 (including “On Liking Women,” now considered queer literary canon) and two new pieces, “Criticism in a Crisis” and “Authority.”
Desire, freedom, authority—these are a few of the concepts that Chu returns to again and again as she evaluates Yellowjackets and Yellowstone, as she provides a book-by-book breakdown of Ottessa Moshfegh’s devotion to excrement, as she weaves together her own relationship with gender as a trans woman with rundowns of feminist milestones throughout history. Chu is provocative, disruptive and very funny, and her criticism is as blistering as it is well-informed. One of the many joys of her work is the questions it raises, from the unexpected (for example, if The Last of Us is such a good show, why was it ever a video game to begin with?) to the painfully obvious yet never before posed (such as, did Zadie Smith give in to the critics?).
Read our interview with Andrea Long Chu, author of ‘Authority.’
The two new essays, “Criticism in a Crisis” and “Authority,” tie the collection together. “Criticism in a Crisis” is an entertaining look through generations of critics wringing their hands over their own profession, and culminates with the perfect insistence that, in order to have a healthy critical community, you must pay writers more. “Authority,” meanwhile, is an example of just how deep Chu can go down a rabbit hole—in this case, the entire history of the concept of authority, who has it, where it comes from and so on. It’s an exhaustive journey back centuries to the Roman Republic, but if you’re caught up in the world of reviewing, be it in a publication or on Goodreads, you’ve probably spent some time wondering about what gives you the “right” to evaluate someone else’s work. Start with “Authority” to figure out how you’ve been ordained, and proceed accordingly.
Within these essays, we see Chu’s brain at work and at play, over many years and across various forms of media. Authority is what it looks like to take nothing for granted, even the books you love and the movies you don’t understand why you love, and to continually ask the hard questions. You could easily focus on the joy of viciousness in these reviews (who doesn’t love a good takedown?), but better yet is to focus on how worthwhile it is to place our favorite things within a larger context.
