Announcement from Books Editor John Williams, Features Editor Ben Williams and Deputy Features Editor Mitch Rubin:
We are thrilled to announce that Becca Rothfeld will be joining The Washington Post as our nonfiction book critic. A widely published critic and essayist, Becca’s work has appeared regularly in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Bookforum, the New York Review of Books and many other places. In 2022, she was a winner of the first annual Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism.
In her stylish and brilliant work, Becca has written about the culture of shaming, Emily Ratajkowski’s musings, spirituality in the age of the algorithm, the internet’s influence on novels and much more.
Becca is a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Balakian Prize for excellence in reviewing (2016 and 2018), and her essay “Ladies in Waiting” was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 2017 and was collected in “Best American Magazine Writing” that same year. She is a Ph.D. candidate (on hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard and earned her undergraduate degree at Dartmouth, where she studied philosophy and German. Her essay collection, tentatively titled “All Things Are Too Small,” is forthcoming.
Becca grew up in Washington (“D.C. proper,” she notes), where she attended Georgetown Day School. She’ll be moving back to the city from Cambridge, Mass. Asked for some colorful personal details, Becca says: “I have few hobbies outside of books and arguing about books and their contents, to be honest, but I have a dog named Kafka, which is sort of colorful.” Her favorite books from recent years include Daniel Mendelsohn's “Three Rings,” Katherine Angel’s “Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again,” Jesse McCarthy's “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” and novels by Garth Greenwell and Jenny Erpenbeck.
Please join us in welcoming Becca to The Post. She starts on April 10.
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