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Imprint: Chatto & Windus
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Published: 14/01/2021
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ISBN: 9781784743345
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Length: 304 Pages
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Dimensions: 222mm x 29mm x 144mm
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Weight: 422g
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RRP: £14.99
Can't Even
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How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
An incendiary personal and cultural investigation of burnout
"Meticulously researched... astutely observed... extremely enlightening" Guardian
"Urgent and insightful book... Read this and get a much-needed perspective" Stylist
Are you tired, stressed and trying your best but somehow still not doing enough? Has the bottom half of your To Do list been locked in place for months? Is everything becoming work as your job seeps into your evenings, you monetise your hobbies and perform your leisure time on social media?
This is burnout - what increasingly like the defining feature of our lives. We are exhausted. But burnout is not a personal failing. It is a creeping part of modern culture, shaped by deep-rooted political, historical and economic forces, and it is affecting how we work, parent, socialise and inhabit the world.
Anne Helen Petersen identifies burnout with moving clarity - what it feels like and how it manifests across communities. Through her own experience, original interviews and detailed analysis, she traces the institutional and generational causes of burnout. And, in doing so, she helps us to let go of our guilt and imagine a possible future.
Reassuring, insightful and galvanising, Can't Even is essential reading for all of us.
"A readable, well-researched guide to a generation" The Times
"Genuinely enlightening... Can't Even is a reminder to the burned out generation that things can be different" Observer
-
Imprint: Chatto & Windus
-
Published: 14/01/2021
-
ISBN: 9781784743345
-
Length: 304 Pages
-
Dimensions: 222mm x 29mm x 144mm
-
Weight: 422g
-
RRP: £14.99
Reviews
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Meticulously researched... astutely observed... extremely enlightening
Sian Cain, Guardian
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A readable, well-researched guide to a generation... Petersen commendably refuses her burnt-out millennial readers any inspirational uplift. Ours is not a dilemma that will be solved by more hard work or more positive thinking or more degrees
James Marriott, The Times, *Book of the Week*
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Urgent and insightful book... Read this and get a much-needed perspective
Francesca Brown, Stylist
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The author is astute in unpicking the many factors that led to a whole generation feeling constantly exhausted... Can't Even is comforting in its insistence that it's not your fault you feel this tired... genuinely enlightening... Can't Even is a reminder to the burned out generation that things can be different
Holly Williams, Observer
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Whether you're looking for solutions or just looking to feel seen, Can't Even is a can't-miss
Harper's Bazaar, "27 Best Books of 2020"
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Reading this incredible book, I had the overwhelming feeling of someone arranging the chaotic fragments of my life into a cohesive whole. Can't Even felt like a field guide, a mirror, and an absolution. Compassionate, wise, and incisive, it is a defining work about a generation defined by work
Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
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[A] razor sharp book of cultural criticism...With blistering prose and all-too vivid reporting, Petersen lays bare the burnout and despair of millennials, while also charting a path to a world where members of her generation can feel as if the boot has been removed from their necks
Esquire
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We think of capitalism as a way of organizing an economy. But given enough time, it goes beyond that: It organizes our lives, our hopes, our relationships. Anne Helen Petersen has written an analytically precise, deeply empathic book about the psychic toll modern capitalism has taken on those shaped by it. Can't Even is essential to understanding our age, and ourselves
Ezra Klein, Vox co-founder and author of Why We're Polarized
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Petersen's third book, a highlight-every-sentence-in-recognition survey of the anxiety and exhaustion baked into the lives of myriad young people, dispels many of the myths and misconceptions-the laziness! the entitlement!-surrounding the generation that came of age amid the internet and economic collapse. Yet rather than pit millennials against boomers, Petersen makes meaningful and constructive connections between the toils and troubles of the two groups
O Magazine
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A cogent and sober analysis of the economic lives that decades of precarity has wrought, told in Petersen's smart, measured style
Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of the National Book Award finalist Thick
