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Maybe someday
31
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
29/100Critics
34/100Scholars
Author:
Eula Biss
Publisher:
Riverhead Books
Date:
September 1, 2020
Having just purchased her first home, the author embarks on a self-audit of the value system she has bought into. The essays in this volume offer an interrogation of work, leisure, and the lived experience of capitalism.
What The Reviewers Say
Bliss enlivens her own critique of capital in the 2020s by delving into the trouble we all avoid discussing — and then staying with it.
... enthralling.
There is a sense that Biss is after something specific, even if she doesn’t know what it is. Metaphors are tested, ironies pressed upon. Etymologies abound, as do precise distinctions: the difference between a privilege and a luxury, between work, labor, service and care.
This book is essentially an account of Ms. Biss’s contradictions, her ambivalence as a relatively well-off consumer in a rich and richly unequal country. But instead of being humorless and apologetic, Having and Being Had is incisive, impressive and often poetic.
