Items related to Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
Synopsis
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 a Jim Crow mining town to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, 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.Faced with a disturbing past and unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilites of American diversity, 'not the sun-shininess of it, or the quote-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it.
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Review
'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
'The essays in this book were written prior to Trump's election, and have acquired extra resonance in light of it. At a time of profound uncertainty about what it means to be American, Biss's insights on the history of American migration, both internal (rural-urban, and vice versa)and external, are especially timely [...] Like so much of Biss's writing, the message here is simultaneously both forceful and measured- no mean feat when there is so much at stake.' --Houman Barekat, Irish Times
'[Notes from No Man's Land] is an archival project, a wide-ranging, elegantly shaped collage.[...] Biss is [..] consistently enlightening.'- Jamie Fisher, the TLS
'Notes from No Man's Land is a beautiful exercise in consciousness; in bringing both intelligence and experience to bear on a subject that has implications for the way one behaves in the world.' --Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
About the Author
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.
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- PublisherFitzcarraldo Editions
- Publication date2017
- ISBN 10 1910695394
- ISBN 13 9781910695395
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages240
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