Author(s): Peter Coviello

Essays

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, and loss where they enter our lives. With him, we reencounter videos; poems; movies like The Shining; shows like The Sopranos; novels by Sam Lipsyte, Sally Rooney, and Paula Fox; and songs by Joni Mitchell, Gladys Knight, Steely Dan, Pavement, Chance, Phoebe Bridgers, SZA, and the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, Prince. Navigating a feeling that Covieilo calls "endstrickenness," he asks what it means to love things in calamitous times, when so much seems shambling toward collapse. Balancing comedy and anger, exhilaration and sorrow, Coviello illuminates the strange ways the things we cherish help us hold on to life and 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."