In Extremis

By Jake Goldsmith

In these essays, originally written for the quarterly journal Exacting Clam, Jake Goldsmith dissects the foundations of our uneasy present with unflinching honesty and a "physiological urgency to have a say" driven by his experience of chronic life-threatening illness.Ranging from confronting what imperils us-the fragility of liberal democracy, the decline of universities, technological triumphalism, the decay of our common language-to what may sustain us-possibility, creativity, the aphorisms of Baltasar Graci n-to even the dubious pleasures of annoyance and the tendency to judge bookshelves, Goldsmith embraces the skeptical humanisms of Raymond Aron and Montaigne in a clear-eyed if necessarily fraught engagement with the world.These essays search for principle in an age of imposture and, rejecting easy formulas, ask what it might mean to live a considered life when body and body politic both are in a state of perpetual emergency.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1963846451
• ISBN13: 9781963846454
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
• Length: 134 Pages
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.8" x 8.3"