The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1's Second Decade

by Mark Krotov (editor), Dayna Tortorici (editor), Nikil Saval (editor)

Genres: Nonfiction

542 pages, Paperback

Published August 27, 2024

Reviews

[Liam McParland · Rating 4 out of 5]

We need to be smarter

[Sadie Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m technically still working through this book but it’s stand alone essays / stories and I’ve read most of them now. So good — I can’t recommend this anthology enough I love everything n+1 does and think this is a really thought provoking timely collection that made me feel very inspired and curious

[Matthew Sun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently I asked my writing group whether all writing can be plotted along the axes of style and substance. We wondered if there might be aesthetically gorgeous pieces of writing that make horrible arguments, or intellectually innovative writing that fails to persuade because it's ugly. Of course, best of all is the writing that does both. I also began to wonder if these axes are really separable at all - if sometimes an essay's argument is actually inseparable from its form.

The writing in The Intellectual Situation embodies that ideal quadrant. The ideas are powerful on their own, sure, but there is something about the craft that seduces you, even if just temporarily, to give in fully to the world(view) the author is portraying. This is the kind of writing that can make you believe that writing itself is worthwhile, both personally and politically.

Here are some standout pieces that I hadn't encountered before reading this collection:
- Canvassing, Nikil Saval
- H., Sarah Resnick
- When a Person Goes Missing, Dawn Lundy Martin
- Not One Tree, Grace Glass with Sasha Tycko

Favorites included in the collection that I had already read before:
- On Liking Women, Andrea Long Chu
- The Feminist, Tony Tulathimutte
- Spadework, Alyssa Battistoni

[Liam Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really appreciated this collection of essays. The writers are defiant, uncorrupted, and often pretty weird. I came to this book after reading Happiness, the previous n+1 anthology, which was also very good. But what I wasn’t expecting after finishing the second anthology was how… fired up I would feel.

Nikhil Saval, Sasha Tycko, and Alyssa Battistoni managed to strike an interest I didn’t think I still had in political organizing, and the phenomenal essays of Andrea Long Chu and Jesse McCarthy scratched my brain’s itch for critical theory, and finally Toni Haslett’s essay “Magic Actions” reflection/reconstruction of the George Floyd rebellion manages to combine the two realms in maybe the best piece of writing I’ve ever encountered.

That’s not to say that there is a shortage of the weird in here — I’m pretty sure Tony Tulathimutte’s “The Feminist made rounds on incel forums, Francesco Pacifico mentioned jerking off in his pandemic dispatches n+1 too many times, and Andrea Long Chu, amidst her brilliance, gives us this gem: “Call that transphobic if you like, that’s not going to stop me from Chilis-Awesome-Blossoming my dick.”

Yaknow what? Hell yeah Andrea Long Chu.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an anthology of pieces from the second decade of the magazine n+1, which focuses on literature, culture, and politics.

I don’t think this is fully for me. There’s a lot of bold writing here, but some felt too audacious, and like it was intended for an in-group that I’m not a part of. In some ways it felt like the generation younger than me trying to define their world and their place in it.