Description: "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 "Mark Greif is the best essayist of my generation. No one is more modern or more classical - or more stylish. This has its alarming effects. When you read Against Everything , you will vow to change your life." Adam Thirlwell "Mark Greif's essays can cut, they can connect, and they can soar. Greif inhabits the center of all his subjects, from Nietzsche to Nas, but there is no display or cynicism here, only a powerful mind thinking hard about our culture and our politics. 'The instant for philosophy is always now,' he writes, because it can take forever. Now is Mark Greif's time." Sean Wilentz "Mark Greif is one of the most consistently interesting American writers of the last decade, and this book proves it. I read him for the pleasure of never knowing where his brain's going next. Here's the first sentence of his essay on cops: 'A surprise of being around police is how much they touch you.' That's the kind of weird and accurate observation I want from an essayist. Get down with a writer who's dogged in his attempt to understand us better, and wise in knowing it's hopeless." --John Jeremiah Sullivan "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 "Mark Greif's book proposes the impossible thing, a phenomenology of the presentat a moment in which the present is slipping by so fast that anything we dare call that is already signed, sealed and delivered to the past. Hip hop, food shows, current events like war and the police, hipsters, exercises, the youth culture this list omits the deliberate and attractive heterogeneity of Greif's notes on the everyday, his attempt to capture its random contents before they are incorporated into some official academic field or trivialized into familiar themes and slogans by an omnivorous public sphere. It isn't a novel, it isn't a journal either (which you could 'dip into'), it's probably not a blog, it is deliberately unfinished (in the sense of 'to be continued', but maybe by all or each of us); but it is certainly wonderful reading which cuts into the present before the latter disappears." --Frederic Jameson

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