Is There God after Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226828077)

Essays considering what it means to love art, culture, and people in an age of accelerating disaster.

This is a book about loving things--books, songs, people--in the shadow of a felt, looming disaster. Through lyrical, funny, heart-wrenching essays, Peter Coviello considers pieces of culture across a fantastic range, setting them inside the vivid scenes of friendship, dispute, romance, talk, and loss, where they enter our lives. Alongside him, we reencounter movies like The Shining, shows like The Sopranos; videos; poems; novels by Sam Lipsyte, Sally Rooney, and Paula Fox; as well as songs by Joni Mitchell, Gladys Knight, Steely Dan, Pavement, and the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, Prince.

Navigating an overwhelming feeling that Coviello calls "endstrickenness," he asks what it means to love things in calamitous times, when so much seems to be shambling toward collapse. Balancing comedy and anger, exhilaration and sorrow, Coviello illuminates the strange ways the things we cherish help us to hold on to life and to its turbulent joys. Is There God after Prince? shows us what twenty-first-century criticism can be, and how it might speak to us, in a time of ruin, in an age of "Last Things."


Author: Peter Coviello
ISBN-10: 0226828077
ISBN-13: 9780226828077
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 10/25/2023
Pages: 304
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.81d

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 10/01/2023 pg. 13