In critic Becca Rothfeld’s opinion, less is definitely not more. Her debut essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, explores the ways in which minimalism is ruining our lives. With curiosity and wit, she tackles topics like mindfulness, puritanism, and decluttering, all of which, she claims, are wrongly being sold as new forms of enlightenment. She takes aim at the lack of nuance in Marie Kondo’s popular tidying up methods and the innocuous nature of Sally Rooney’s work, while praising the benefits of passionate sex and the films of body horror auteur David Cronenberg. With each new essay, Rothfeld drives home her thesis: by sanitizing and shrinking the world around us, we are depriving ourselves of the unpredictability, ugliness, and eroticism that makes life worth living.
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