“The best claim to be his generation’s finest essayist comes in the concluding essay on Thoreau, the Occupy movement and his own generation. Taken as a whole the book is a powerful injunction to look, listen and reflect, our surest means of defiance against the encroaching dimness.”

– Richard Godwin, Evening Standard

“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

“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

“Anyone who hasn’t discovered Mark Greif’s unforgettable essays yet in the pages of n+1—America’s most powerful literary mag, which he co-founded—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

“Greif’s book proposes the impossible thing, a phenomenology of the present—at 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.”

– Fredric Jameson

“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

“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 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. I found the crackle of rigor in these essays, but also so much tenderness and awe.”

– Leslie Jamison

“This wonderful collection of essays about contemporary American life is not only thought-provoking but also a pedigree version of that rarest beast, ‘the public understanding of the humanities.’… Underneath a fox-like curiosity in the seeming ephemera of popular culture is a hedgehog concern with how we experience all these and what that experience means. … [T]his is how academics and intellectuals ought to write for the (mythical) general reader.”

– Robert Eaglestone, Times Higher Education

“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 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.”

– Christian Lorentzen, NY1

“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’)

“Politically engaged, coolly stylish and often drily funny … The unflinching intelligence of his writing can be exhilarating.”

– Guardian