n+1 founding editor Mark Greif launches his newest book of cultural criticism and argument, Against Everything. In conversation with Wesley Morris, Critic-at-Large for the New York Times. With books for sale from our friends at WORD Bookstore.

Mark Greif received a BA summa cum laude from Harvard in history and literature; an M.Phil. from Oxford in English as a British Marshall Scholar; and a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale. In 2004, he co-founded n+1, and has been a principal at the magazine since. In 2005 and 2007 his essays were chosen for The Best American Essays. His scholarly book, The Age of the Crisis of Man, was published in 2015 by Princeton University Press. In 2013–2014, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in its School of Social Science. In 2015, he was awarded the Charles Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

“In Against Everything, Mark Greif makes a case for so much: for curiosity and precision, for second glances, for reconsidering, for paying attention to the world and not being satisfied by what it’s become, or ever been. Greif is interested in blame and desire and how we coax and wrench meaning from our lives. He’s interested in how we might remain alive to what matters while staying attuned—also—to the truth of mattering itself as something fluid, its contours up for grabs. His unexpected turns of thought come with such persuasive acuity they sound like common sense. I found the crackle of rigor in these essays, but also so much tenderness and awe.”
⎻⎻ Leslie Jamison    
                                                                                                                                                                                
“Mark Greif writes a contrarian, skeptical prose that is at the same time never cynical: it opens out on to beauty and the possibility of change.”
⎻⎻ Zadie Smith

“The ideas and images I discover in Mark Greif’s essays stay with me for years, and become part of the way I experience and understand the world. I couldn’t be happier that this book is being published so I can read them all over again.”
⎻⎻ Sheila Heti

“Anyone who hasn't discovered Mark Greif's unforgettable essays yet in the pages of n+1--the country's most powerful literary mag, which he cofounded--will thank me for demanding you rush out to buy his grasp-you-by-the-throat collection Against Everything. Like James Wood or Susan Sontag, George Orwell or Randall Jarrell, Greif defines our age yet writes with such wit and grace, he'll last forever. A must-read collection by one of our preeminent thinkers.”
⎻⎻ Mary Karr

“I love Mark Greif. No living essayist effects the destruction of everything other people hold dear with a lighter or more elegant touch. An unmitigated delight.”
⎻⎻ Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed

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