
Authority
Essays
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Narrated by:
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Andrea Long Chu
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By:
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Andrea Long Chu
About this listen
Read by the author, this bold, provocative collection of essays asks one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?
Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers. Authority brings together Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama; questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butler’s science fiction as a parable of slavery; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism.
Criticism today is having a crisis of authority—but so says every generation of critics. In two magisterial new essays, Chu offers a revised intellectual history of this perennial crisis, tracing the surprisingly political contours of criticism from its origins in the Enlightenment to our present age of social media. Rather than succumbing to an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the genuine crises, from authoritarianism to genocide, that confront us today.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2025 Andrea Long Chu (P)2025 Macmillan AudioCritic reviews
"This brilliant collection from Chu showcases the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic’s reflections on literature, television, and the art of criticism . . . Intellectually rigorous and lucidly argued, this affirms Chu’s status as one of the most incisive critics working today." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[Chu's] book and television reviews astutely examine some of the most fraught topics of our current cultural moment in often breathtaking ways. Authority, her first book since winning the award, explores the role of serious criticism in a world of unadulterated opinions." —Electric Literature
"I can’t wait to disappear into this collection of essays from one of my favorite critics . . . tackling culture in all its forms—and also, in two new essays, taking on criticism itself, and how it should (or can) be practiced today. If anyone should know, it’s Chu." —LitHub
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Story
In 1889, while upholding the latest in a series of exclusionary laws targeting Chinese immigrants, the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field characterized the Chinese as “impossible to assimilate with our people” and “strangers in the land.” Today, there are twenty-four million people of Asian descent in the United States, and yet, as Luo observes in his riveting, sorrowful narrative, the question of belonging still trails them. Strangers in the Land tells the story of a people who migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan—Gold Mountain.
By: Michael Luo
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The Emperor of Gladness
- A Novel
- By: Ocean Vuong
- Narrated by: James Aaron Oh
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak.
By: Ocean Vuong
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Sky Daddy
- A Novel
- By: Kate Folk
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Linda is doing her best to lead a life that would appear normal to the casual observer. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a video-sharing platform, then rides the bus home to the windowless garage she rents on the outskirts of San Francisco. But on the last Friday of each month, she indulges her true passion, taking BART to SFO for a round-trip flight to a regional hub. The destination is irrelevant, because each trip means a new date with a handsome stranger—a stranger with intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages, and powerful engines.
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Beautiful, weird
- By M on 04-13-25
By: Kate Folk
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When We Were Real
- By: Daryl Gregory
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
JP and Dulin have been the best of friends for decades. When JP finds out his cancer has aggressively returned, Dulin decides it’s the perfect time for one last adventure: a week-long bus tour of North America’s Impossibles, the physics-defying glitches and geographic miracles that started cropping up seven years earlier—right after the Announcement that revealed our world to be merely a digital simulacrum. The outing, courtesy of Canterbury Trails Tours, promises the trip of a (not completely real) lifetime in a (not completely deluxe) coach.
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Funny, sharp, delightful
- By ElectricStirrer on 04-09-25
By: Daryl Gregory
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Mark Twain
- By: Ron Chernow
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 48 hrs
- Unabridged
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Story
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain.
By: Ron Chernow
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Stag Dance
- A Novel & Stories
- By: Torrey Peters
- Narrated by: Lee Osorio, Briggon Snow, Eileen Noonan, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.
By: Torrey Peters