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"Is There God After Prince? is a book about loving things (books, songs, poems, people) in the shadow of looming disaster. Coviello's dazzling, highly personal essays address pieces of contemporary culture across an expansive range--songs by Prince, Joni Mitchell, SZA, and Phoebe Bridgers, writings by Sam Lipsyte, Paula Fox, Paul Beatty, and Dana Spiotta, movies like Heathers, TV shows like The Sopranos, as well as videos, poems, and other pop artefacts. Coviello places these artefacts back in the scenes where he first found them and traces what they did there, whether private (a kid's graduation, an aging parent, a divorce) or public (an election, a pandemic). Laced throughout is a queasy fascination with signs that so much is now coming to an end. It is on this terrain of endstrickenness, as Coviello calls it, that the book lingers, though it does so often in the mood of a startled joyousness, one that these pieces are at pains to understand. Cumulatively, Is There God After Prince? wants to be a model for what criticism can do--what it can sound like, how much sorrow and delight it can get into one place--in an era of Last Things"--
About the author
Peter Coviello is the author of five previous books, including
Tomorrow's Parties, a finalist for a 2013 Lambda Award in LGBT Studies;
Long Players, a memoir selected as one of
Artforum's Ten Best Books of 2018; and
Make Yourselves Gods, also published by the University of Chicago Press. His essays have appeared in
Frieze,
Chicago Review, Los Angeles Review of Books,
Raritan,
Elle, and
Believer, among other publications. He is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
