April 9, 2025
In an era marked by the constant stream of content and criticism from self-proclaimed experts, one might ask: who, exactly, are the authorities we can trust?
In Authority, a bold, provocative collection of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu offers a revised intellectual history of this timeless struggle, tracing the political contours of criticism from its origins in the Enlightenment to our present age of social media. Rather than succumbing to an endless cycle of inflated emergencies, Authority makes a compelling case for how to approach criticism in light of the genuine crises—from authoritarianism to genocide—that confront us today.
With devastating wit and clarity, Chu has defied the imperative to separate politics from art. Authority brings together her critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, and video games.
The Center for Fiction is thrilled to have welcomed Chu in conversation with Arielle Angel, writer and editor of Jewish Currents, to discuss one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?
Featured Book
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Authority
By Andrea Long Chu
Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux
Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling 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, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. 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; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism.
Criticism today is having a crisis of authority—but so says every generation of critics. In two magisterial new essays, Chu offers a revised intellectual history of this perennial crisis, tracing the surprisingly political contours of criticism from its origins in the Enlightenment to our present age of social media. Rather than succumbing to an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the genuine crises, from authoritarianism to genocide, that confront us today.
Featuring
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Andrea Long Chu
Andrea Long Chu
Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females was published 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, the Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, and Jewish Currents.
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Arielle Angel
Arielle Angel
Arielle Angel grew up in Miami, Florida and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the editor of Jewish Currents and a frequent host of the Jewish Currents podcast, On the Nose. She has been awarded artist residencies at Hub-Bub in Spartanburg, South Carolina; Woodstock Byrdcliffe Artists Guild in Woodstock, New York; the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City; Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga, Wyoming; Jentel in Banner, Wyoming; and Abode Farm in New Lebanon, NY. She was a 2018 New Jewish Culture Fellow and a 2016 Fellow at Tent: Creative Writing at The Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. In addition to Jewish Currents, her work has appeared in the Guardian, Guernica, and Off Assignment.
