Nothing Alien

Nothing Alien spans thirty-five years of Lee Siegel’s career. Exploring figures as varied as Fra Angelico and Sophia Loren, James Baldwin and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marilynne Robinson and Quentin Tarantino, Siegel is unique among American critics for the breadth of his subjects and the striking originality of his insights.

He has analyzed politics and politicians from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. He has reflected on the culture of vulgarity, welcomed the so-called 'death of the humanities', defended the American suburb and the American department store, attacked the idea of women in combat, and called, in one particularly influential and incendiary essay, on people crushed by student debt to walk away from their loans. He has eviscerated American pragmatism, reinterpreted European modernism, drawn connections between antidepressants and the decline of democratic empathy, and deplored the death of the senses. He has written personal reminiscences of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Frank Kermode, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, and Lewis Lapham, and he has composed intimate personal essays about fatherhood, baseball, and mortality.

Celebrated, and vilified, for his acid pen, he reveals himself here as both ferocious and tender, bristling with compassion and overflowing with spleen. Siegel has stepped on every imaginable toe, but the peculiar shape of his genius is an inescepable fact, and everyone will be talking about this remarkable collection of work.