NOTHING ALIEN
Essays: 1989–2024
Essays: 1989–2024
OUT MAY 2025
Paperback
Extent: 468 pages
Trim: 15 x 22 cm
ISBN: 9781916809550
Price: $25
One of the country's most eloquent and acid-tongued cultural critics.
––Deborah Solomon, New York Times Magazine
Wildly and satisfyingly unpredictable.
––Janet Malcolm
A fluent and culturally voracious critic,
Siegel writes a mean and memorable sentence.
––Financial Times
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 inescapable fact, and everyone will be talking about this remarkable collection of work.
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 inescapable fact, and everyone will be talking about this remarkable collection of work.
LEE SIEGEL is the author of seven previous books, including Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, The Draw: A Memoir, and Why Argument Matters. He has published over 800 articles, essays, and reviews in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, Harper's, and the Atlantic, among many other publications. He has been a senior editor of and television critic for the New Republic, book critic for The Nation, art critic for Slate, associate editor of ARTnews, senior columnist for the Daily Beast, and weekly columnist for the New York Observer. In 2002, he received a National Magazine Award. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and their two children.