Andrea Long Chu's 6 favorite books for people who crave new ideas

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Andrea Long Chu is a book critic and essayist for New York magazine who the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2023. Her new book, Authority, collects her published reviews and essays and adds a statement of purpose and a short intellectual history of criticism.

'Against Interpretation' by Susan Sontag (1966)

The title is so good that it can trick you into agreeing with it on instinct. Sontag's approach to criticism is always grounded in her undeniable stylishness, even when her actual claims about art are preposterous or insufferable. (To her credit, she later acknowledged this in an afterword.) Buy it here.

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'Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative' by Isabella Hammad (2024)

A lucid lecture from a talented novelist, delivered just nine days before Oct. 7 and published a year later. Hammad articulates the uses and abuses of recognition in a world where expressing "sympathy" for the Palestinian can go hand in hand with endorsing the Israeli occupation. Buy it here.

'Cruel Optimism' by Lauren Berlant (2011)

This book changed my life when I first encountered it in graduate school. It made me believe that there was someone else in the world who thought the way I did. Lauren passed away a few years ago, and though we knew each other only glancingly, I often feel their loss. Fitting for a book about how desire can be an obstacle to itself. Buy it here.

'Stag Dance' by Torrey Peters (2025)

This book collects several of Peters' early novellas, which she originally released for free, as well as an extraordinary new novel, written in a terrifically unexpected voice. "We are in the presence of a soul," someone said of George Eliot. That's how I feel about Peters, who may be single-handedly taking trans literature into a new dimension. Buy it here.

'Second Place' by Rachel Cusk (2021)

I've written damningly of Cusk, but there's no denying her talent. Her exceptional novel Outline may be more technically perfect, but Second Place is sexy, thrilling, humectant, borrowing its melodramatic flair from Cusk's "precritical" work. The gender politics are, however, as awful as ever. Buy it here.

'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' by Sigmund Freud (1920)

Any Freud is good Freud. This is the book that proposed the existence of the death drive, the natural inclination in all of us to die on our own terms. In the process, Freud had to throw out his old system and create a new one. For that kind of intellectual daring alone, a thrilling read. Buy it here.