Authority

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A bold, provocative collection of essays on one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything? 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