About The Book

Written originally for a special issue of The New Yorker and reissued here with a new foreword by the author, Within the Context of No Context is George W. S. Trow’s brilliant exposition on the state of American culture and twentieth-century life.

Published to widespread acclaim, Within the Context of No Context became an immediate classic and is, to this day, a favorite work of writers and critics alike. Both a chilling commentary on the times in which it was written and an eerie premonition of the future, Trow’s work locates and traces, describes and analyzes the components of change in contemporary America…a culture increasingly determined by the shallow worlds of consumer products, daytime television, and celebrity heroes.

Praise

“This elegant little book is essential reading for anyone interested in the demise, the terminal silliness, of our culture.”–John Irving, The New York Times Book Review

“In this elegant, poignant essay, written with the grace of a master stylist, George Trow articulates the accelerated impermanence of American culture with a precision that is both flaunting and devastating.” –Rudy Wurlitrer

“Within the Context of No Context is a masterpiece of the century that belongs on a shelf next to Theodore Adorno’s Minima Moralia and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.” –Michael Tolkin

“The writing in this book is so extraordinary. It is as if George Trow had dived down in some deep sea and had taken only the most rare, the most beautiful, and sometimes the most disturbing of words and ideas, to tell us about the things that are not so rare, not so beautiful, but are most disturbing in our culture.” –Jamaica Kincaid