Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award Many worry that criticism is suffering from a crisis of authority. In a world where everyone’s a critic, what is criticism for? Since her canonical essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a leading public intellectual and a bold cartographer of the new landscape of taste itself. Authority brings together sharp, illuminating essays on everything from musical theater to sci-fi novels, as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of personal essays first published in the magazine n+1 . Throughout, Chu defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, charging fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with complacent humanism and modeling how the left might brave the culture wars with both its faculty of judgment and its sense of justice intact. In two magisterial new essays, Chu offers a fresh intellectual history of criticism’s crisis of authority, tracing the surprisingly political contours of the discipline from its origins in the Enlightenment to our present age of social media. The desire to recover some lost authority, she argues, is neither new nor particularly freeing. Rather than being taken in by an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies over the state of our culture, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the actual crises, from climate change to rising authoritarianism, that confront us today. "Chu is a careful reader―when she takes someone down, it’s with the scalpel of obsession rather than the mere might of a chainsaw. Better yet, her work surprises us." ―Grace Byron, Los Angeles Review of Books "At the level of the sentence―one of my favorite levels―Chu is hard to match. She can be biting, and she can be beautiful. She can make language do anything she wants without even breaking a sweat." ―Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post "Chu not only demonstrates the value of criticism at its boldest and, yes, most authoritative but also finds a way to effectively marry―in a way that her predecessors often struggled with―experience and expertise, aesthetics and politics.” ―Kevin Lozano, The Nation "Chu is refreshingly strident in her defense of politicizing art and culture criticism, rejecting mannered neutrality in favor of fervent politics, presented in playfully poisonous prose . . . What if, she asks, rather than an artist-cum-patriot, the critic was a simple “craftsman”? This is not a demotion, but an expansion of the critic’s possibilities as a political actor: from tyrant or complicit bureaucrat to spy, saboteur, or jester, from pretentious arbiter to loquacious mystic, channeling a spirit in impassioned directions rather than simply following its currents." ―Emmeline Clein, Cultured "Chu is one of our keenest critics . . . When she has an opinion it is with authority, the kind bestowed by many followers, awards, and true laser-perception . . . Humor, grit, psychoanalysis, despair, and measured lashes fill the pages of Authority . Few are as precise, even when she plays it fast and loose. Few can cut to the marrow." ―Grace Byron, The Whitney Review "Chu writes about culture, all of it . . . [She] employs her considerable expertise to argue that criticism can and should leave behind theoretical nitpicking and address the big, dangerous global issues at hand." ―Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times “Every time Andrea Long Chu, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for New York Magazine , publishes a new essay, I make time to read it slowly, thoughtfully, and with relish . . . Chu’s subjects are wide-ranging but always relevant, and her critiques of The Last of Us , The Phantom of the Opera , and Zadie Smith rank amongst my favorites. If you care about culture in any of its endless forms, you should be reading Chu.” ―Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle "Chu moves nimbly between genres, interleaving memoir, history, and polemic. Her acrobatic chains of reasoning are punctuated by bracing pronouncements. She is funny . . . Chu remains one of our most energetically clever writers." ―Sam Huber, The Yale Review "An extraordinary treatise on what it means to be critical . . . It’s a masterwork in criticism and an ode to the form itself . . . This is a book that made me want to be a better critic and writer, and one that reminded me exactly why it is I seek out Chu’s writing wherever it’s published." ―Nick Havey, Washington Independent Review of Books "The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic examines everything from The Phantom of the Opera to social media, weaving a compelling narrative about how criticism, now more than ever, presents a solution to our current crises." ―Eva M. Baron, The Millions " Authority reveals that to be critical is not necessarily about gathering all the information you possibly can in order to poke holes in a piece of art, but more about organizing the knowledge you’re tending and then applying it