A brilliant collection of essays from one of the most highly acclaimed young writers in the US

Mark Greif is one of the most exciting writers of his generation. In Against Everything, he make us rethink the ordinary, taking our own lives seriously, exploring how we might live an honest life in these dishonest times. In a series of coruscating set pieces he asks why we put ourselves through the pains of exercise, what shopping in organic supermarkets does for our sense of self-worth, what the political identity of the hipster might be, and what happens to us when we listen to too much Radiohead. From such counter intuitive observations, Greif exposes the fundamental contradictions between our actions, desires and the excuses that we make to ourselves in hope of consolation. With the wit and seriousness of David Foster Wallace, Against Everything is the most thought-provoking study and essential guide to everyday life under twenty-first century capitalism.

"Embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral and personable. Greif brings to mind a host of critics from William Hazlitt to Lionel Trillling, but most of all he suggests it is possible to write about culture with a reverence for language and a passion for what has come before. I would read anything he writes, anywhere." - New York Times Book Review

"Greif's essays aren't really "against" and oppositional. Instead, they work through the experience of doing to find something more complex and luminous." - Times Higher Education

"His generation's finest essayist...a powerful injunction to look, listen and reflect, our surest means of defiance against the encroaching dimness." - Evening Standard

"Greif is a critic of the modern American condition...a dazzling intellectual, and like all the best philosophers, he thinks we all can and should live our lives like philosophers. To read Against Everything is a good start on that path." - NY1

"[A] prodigy in that class of gifted and talented writers responsible for bringing us n+1, the magazine that effectively remade the intellectual scene in New York City[,]. Greif showed everyone how it could and should be done ... Against Everything, a collection that features many of Greif's best essays, offers a good occasion to consider what it was that made his early work so singularly powerful." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"The title Against Everything announces a revision of Susan Sontag's project, or a completion of it. Sontag's "Against Interpretation" concluded, in 1966, that we ought to replace our hermeneutic drive with an erotics of art. Greif sees eros, however, as just one of the instinctive drives whose possibilities for pleasure and rebellion have been captured by the powerful, packaged by the inventive, and sold back to us not only with our consent but with our gratitude. Greif's sentences themselves can sound, at times, like Sontag's, especially in his admonitory mode, but they can also echo with the placid alienation of Joan Didion, or the commonsensical modesty of Richard Rorty." - Bookforum

"Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his hand...There is, in truth, nothing that Greif writes that doesn't have a kernel of interest at its core...intriguing...embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral and personable. Greif brings to mind a host of critics from William Hazlitt to Lionel Trilling, but most of all he suggests it is possible to write about the culture with a reverence for language and a passion for what has come before. I would read anything he writes, anywhere." - The New York Times Book Review

"The truth is that Greif, as we come to know him in these essays, is a deeply hopeful thinker, full of visions of a better, even perfect, world. His disciplined, thoughtful critiques of all manner of cultural phenomena-from YouTube videos to the mania for exercise-rest on an intuition that the world we have been given is not good enough...To argue this point with Against Everything is not to dismiss Greif's achievement, but the reverse. An intellectual's job is to provoke thought and argument, and this Greif does as well as anyone writing today." - Tablet

"I was impressed above all by the resourcefulness of his prose, the concentrated intelligence of the exercise ... By being so alertly of his time, Greif becomes the vehicle for demonstrating just how out of joint the times really are." - London Review of Books

"Smart, profound" - 4Columns

"Engaging in its honesty and earnestness and his critical evaluation of the social and cultural impact of consumer capitalism is clearly worth welcoming." - Morning Star

"It makes you think ... Greif thinks that a whole lot will have to change before real choice is possible. Until then, it's not enough to be against the box-office and the real-estate section and the best-seller list. Until then, we have to be against ... everything." - New Yorker

"It is difficult to do justice to the subtlety and wit of Greif's arguments." - Times Literary Supplement

"Matches brilliant critique with improbable optimism. His essays risk embarrassment to analyse the irritations of urban life - hipsters, foodies, gym-goers - so that we might see these characters in ourselves, and treat them with, if not more kindness, more interest." - Spectator [Books of the Year]

"Mark Greif's essay on the Kafkaesque nature of the modern gym, Against Exercise, is already a classic; and his new book, Against Everything (Verso), tells us it's not just the gym, it's also our music, our culture, our political life - everything about us, in fact - that is right out of Kafka." - Guardian [Books of the Year]

"Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his hand ... There is, in truth, nothing that Greif writes that doesn't have a kernel of interest at its core ... intriguing ... embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral and personable. Greif brings to mind a host of critics from William Hazlitt to Lionel Trilling, but most of all he suggests it is possible to write about the culture with a reverence for language and a passion for what has come before. I would read anything he writes, anywhere." - New York Times Book Review

"Isn't it elitist to talk about punk as if it were a text? To juxtapose Rousseau with a dating show? To say an intense workout is reminiscent of Kafka? ... Against Everything, a new essay collection by Mark Greif ... approaches populist topics like exercise, food, and pop culture from a decidedly not-populist perspective in order to deconstruct them, see how they work, and understand what they really mean to us. While the collection's title is delightfully antagonistic ... the contents are not necessarily so. Greif's point is not to tell you how to live, but to encourage you to really think about how you're living." - VICE

"Mark Greif's Against Everything-as its title suggests-matches brilliant critique with improbable optimism. His essays risk embarrassment to analyse the irritations of urban life-hipsters, foodies, gym-goers-so that we might see these characters in ourselves, and treat them with, if not more kindness, more interest." - The Spectator (UK) Best Books of the Year

"Susan Sontag was against interpretation. Laura Kipnis was against love. Seven were against Thebes. Mark Greif is against everything ... Against Everything is really a book on a single subject: contemporary life, more specifically, the kind of life that someone who would buy such a book, or read a column about such a book-in short, yourself-might right now be living. It's meant to be consumed from beginning to end. It makes you think ... Greif's argument-and this is what separates him from the usual solver of the times-is that what's killing us is deeply embedded in our social and economic system. It's not the gym that's the problem. It's the way we live now, which is making the gym seem like a solution to something. Greif thinks that a whole lot will have to change before real choice is possible. Until then, it's not enough to be against the box-office and the real-estate section and the best-seller list. Until then, we have to be against ... everything." - New Yorker

"Against everything, if it was corrupt, dubious, enervating, untrue to us, false to happiness," writes n+1 co-founder Mark Greif...Greif isn't a doomsayer, but a smart man, soused in decency and fellow feeling. He would like to know the meaning of life...Civil disobedience is a lived way to counter plutocracy. Consider Occupy Wall Street, an action in which Greif participated. "Fight the Power." That's to live." - San Francisco Chronicle

"Dark, wonderful essays on contemporary derangement ... academically current but free of jargon; discontented but free of resignation; gladiatorial but free of truculence; sincere but free of gentility ... [T]o a reader of my generation, [they] have taken on the finish of classics." - Bookforum

"These smart and bracingly negative essays will break you out of your Facebook-induced stupor." - Esquire

"[M]aybe you've missed cofounder Mark Greif's years of essayistic genius for [n+1]. This book is a one stop shop to fix that. In thoughtful, deeply informed, nuanced works of criticism, Greif makes the case "Against Exercise," questions "What Was the Hipster?" and delves into "Octomom and the Market in Babies." ... [F]ans of in-depth cultural criticism will have the perfect companion in this compendium." - Huffington Post

"These essays carve out a space of silence ... a void levered open for new knowledge to rush in and fill ... Against Everything is the work of a gadfly essayist, not a windbag: in it, Greif is nasty and fun and also takes us to new and spacious places." - The Awl

"Greif has outdone himself (and this is saying something, because his work has consistently blown us away) with this collection of critical essays ... Everything is brilliantly disseminated, clearly argued, and will leave you wanting to host (or at least attend) dinner parties where you can show off your newfound knowledge." - Nylon

"Politically engaged, coolly stylish and often drily funny" - Guardian