In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays - Rilegato

“[A] devastatingly good new book . . . Ms. Roiphe’s are how you want your essays to sound: lean and literate, not unlike Orwell’s, with a frightening ratio of velocity to torque. . . . Among Ms. Roiphe’s gifts is one for brevity. She lingers long enough to make her points, and no longer. If I could condense my opinion of her new book onto a T-shirt, that Beefy-T would read: ‘Team Roiphe.’” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Watch out, Camille Paglia! Your starring role as our leading literary provocateur might be threatened by 44-year-old Katie Roiphe, whose book In Praise of Messy Lives I’m sending to a dozen friends for Christmas. Daring, vivid, combative . . . the refreshing irreverence of her book might well be unique among writers of her generation.” —Francine du Plessix Gray, Wall Street Journal

“The 10 literary essays at the heart of In Praise of Messy Lives are wicked and endearing; the language is conversational and burnished to a hard shine.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Bracing . . . and hilarious. . . . Roiphe writes with an archer’s aim and a bullfighter’s bravado. . . . her cultural soundings do run deep.” —Booklist

“Fascinating, lively . . . Roiphe is a fine, serious writer. Her essays are surprising, interesting and sharp. . . .her voice is confident and consistent.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Roiphe’s writing is prickly and provocative . . . courageous, and most welcome when it cuts deep.” —Publisher's Weekly
 
“No sacred cow, exalted personage, or sanctimonious hypocrisy is safe from the sharp eye of Katie Roiphe. In In Praise of Messy Lives, she delivers timely, coruscating verdicts on everything from working women’s fantasies to Philip Roth to the rage of Gawker. An essential read for our cultural confusion.” —Tina Brown
 
“Katie Roiphe does not so much explode pieties as slice them open and prod their strands apart with equal parts rigor and transfixed, childlike curiosity. In Praise of Messy Lives represents a warm, freethinking, and satisfying embrace of the inartificial, the vexed, and the unruly.” —Alison Bechdel
 
“Katie Roiphe is one of the most insightful, exciting writers of her generation. She’s daring, fierce, and entirely original.” —Gay Talese

Katie Roiphe is a professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. She writes a column on life, literature, and politics for Slate and writes for The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her two children.