Overview

A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity, Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays - teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting from an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of hurricane Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighbourhood. As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across from biblical Babylon to the freedmen's schools of Reconstruction to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, religious pamphlets, and reality television. These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighbourhood participate in preserving racial privilege. 'I can't think of an American writer at work today who matches Eula Biss's combination of lyrical precision, exhaustive research, timely provocation, and fiercely examined conscience.' - Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts 'Two of the qualities that make Eula Biss's essays in Notes from No Man's Land compelling and beautiful are precision and independence ... She's important to this moment, important to the opening up of what essays can be, important for setting a standard of integrity and insight, and she's also a joy to read.' - Rebecca Solnit

Full Product Details

9781910695395

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Eula Biss's elegantly structured essays in Notes from No Man's Land are delivered with a deceptively quiet insistence that nevertheless leaves the reader shaken. [...] in a detached, poetic narrative voice that is as mesmerising as it is sure-footed, Biss deftly turns to a consideration of what happened next. [...] So it is with the rest of this wondrous book. [...] She begins in one place and confidently leads somewhere unexpected. She picks and worries at the idea of race in America - incarceration, education, social welfare. [...] Lyrical she may be, but she is also exhilaratingly bold. Notes From No Man's Land offers an uncompromising interrogation of a troubled land by a writer who refuses what could be her birthright as a white woman [...] Biss is rare in that she does not treat her own race as the default (the norm from which 'people of colour' are somehow deviating). The fact that this in itself is remarkable proves the value of her endeavour.' - Ellah Allfrey, The Spectator 'I can't think of an American writer at work today who matches Eula Biss's combination of lyrical precision, exhaustive research, timely provocation, and fiercely examined conscience.' - Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts 'Two of the qualities that make Eula Biss's essays in Notes from No Man's Land compelling and beautiful are precision and independence - independence from orthodoxies of the right and left and the conventions of literary essays and their displays of sensibility and sensitivity. And whatever topic she takes up she dissects and analyzes with startling insight that comes from deep reading and original thinking. She's important to this moment, important to the opening up of what essays can be, important for setting a standard of integrity and insight, and she's also a joy to read.' - Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark

'NOTES FROM NO MAN'S LAND is the kind of book that rewards and even demands multiple readings. It provokes, troubles, charms, challenges, and occasionally hectors the reader, and it raises more questions than it answers. It is strident and brave in its unwillingness to offer comfort, and, unlike all but a handful of the best books I have ever read, it is unimpeachably great.'-- Kylie Minor, Salon

Author Information

Eula Biss is the author of The Balloonists, Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays, which received the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and On Immunity. Her essays have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading and The Best Creative Nonfiction, as well as in the Believer and Harper's. Her writing has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Biss holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa. She teaches at Northwestern University and lives in Chicago.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available