Published in 2024
288 pages
8 hours and 47 minutes
Lauren Oyler‘s essays on books and culture appear regularly in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, the Guardian, New York magazine’s The Cut, Bookforum, the Baffler, the New Republic, and other publications. From 2015 to 2017, she was an editor at Broadly, the now-defunct women’s site at Vice. Before that, she was a freelance copy editor in Berlin. She co-wrote two books with Alyssa Mastromonaco and has ghostwritten other works as well. Her first novel, Fake Accounts, was a national bestseller and is currently being adapted into a television series. She lives in Berlin.
What is this book about?
I heard this crazy story, and I want you to know.
It is the age of internet gossip; of social networks, repackaged ideas and rating everything out of five stars. Mega-famous celebrities respond with fury to critics who publish less-than-rapturous reviews of their work (and then delete their tweets); CEOs talk about reclaiming ‘the power of vulnerability’; and in the world of fiction, writers eschew actually making things up in favour of ‘always just talking about themselves’.
In this blistering, irreverent and very funny first book of non-fiction, Lauren Oyler – one of the most trenchant, influential, and revelatory critics of her generation – takes on the bizarre particularities of our present moment in a series of interconnected essays about literature, the attention economy, gossip, the role of criticism and her own relentless, teeth-grinding anxiety.
Illuminating and thought-provoking, by turns drily scathing and disarmingly open, No Judgement excavates the layers of psychology and meaning in how we communicate, tell stories and make critical judgements – to offer dazzling insights into how we live and think today.
