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Jennifer Howard

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A paler shade of white: HAVING AND BEING HAD by Eula Biss

January 24, 2021

Given my interest in consumer culture and what it does to people, I was glad the TLS asked me to write about Eula Biss’s new book about her own vexed relationship to things:

Having and Being Had dwells on Biss’s unease about her participation in a system whose values she does not embrace, even as she savours its rewards. No pleasure can be simple. She evokes the never-satisfied hunger that characterizes life as a consumer under late-stage capitalism: “In the furniture stores we visit, I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing.”

 

Tagged With: book reviews, consumer culture, consumerism, Eula Biss, TLS

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Writer, journalist, editor, gadabout. Book- and nature lover. Washingtonian. LLC. Read more »

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