Mean Boys

Mean Boys A Personal History

Hardback (01 Aug 2024)

Save $6.30

  • RRP $29.05
  • $22.75
Add to basket

Includes delivery to the United States

10+ copies available online - Usually dispatched within 7 days

Publisher's Synopsis

For readers of Monsters and Gay Bar, a ferocious inquiry into art and desire, style and politics, madness and salvation, and coming of age in our volatile, image-obsessed present.

You know them when you see them: mean boys take up space, wielding cruelty to claim their place in the pecking order. Some mean boys make art or music or fashion; others make memes. Mean boys stomp the runways in Milan and Paris; mean boys marched at Charlottesville. And in the eyes of critic and style expert Geoffrey Mak, mean boys are the emblem of our society: an era ravenous for novelty, always thirsting for the next edgy thing, even at our peril.

In this pyrotechnic memoir-in-essays, Mak ranges widely over our landscape of paranoia, crisis, and frenetic, clickable consumption. He grants readers an inside pass to the spaces where culture was made and unmade over the past decade, from the antiseptic glare of white-walled galleries to the darkest corners of Berlin techno clubs. As the gay son of an evangelical minister, Mak fled to those spaces, hoping to join a rootless, influential elite. But when calamity struck, it forced Mak to confront the costs of mistaking status for belonging. Fusing personal essay and cultural critique, Mean Boys investigates exile and return, transgression and forgiveness, and the value of faith, empathy, and friendship in a world designed to make us want what is bad for us.

Book information

ISBN: 9781635577945
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury
Pub date:
DEWEY: 306.76092
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: 288
Weight: 454g
Height: 210mm
Width: 140mm
Spine width: 27mm