Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays - Eula Biss

Category: Anthology, Literature, Misc. Non-fiction
Language: English
Keywords: History Philosophy Non-fiction Politics Sociology

Written by Eula Biss
Read by Jennifer Van Dyck
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps


Notes from No Man’s Land
American Essays
By Eula Biss
Narrated by Jennifer Van Dyck
Length 6 hrs and 12 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date 01-11-13
Language English
Publisher Audible Studios

Publisher’s Summary

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize

A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity

In a book that begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies, Eula Biss explores race in America. 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 for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago’s most diverse neighborhood. As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across time from biblical Babylon to the freedman’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 shows.

These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. Faced with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilities of American diversity, “not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it.”

©2009 Eula Biss (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Critic Reviews
10 Best Audiobooks of 2013 (Salon)
“A collection of wildly inventive essays about race from the point of view of a white female writer whose research into the history of telephone poles yielded a record of 2,354 New York Times articles published between 1880 and 1920 about lynchings.” (Kyle Minor, Salon)

“Traversing an isthmus between white America and nonwhite America, she notes her own, ample opportunities, yet refuses to relinquish the struggle for racial identity to those that have traditionally been more oppressed.” ( Columbia Journalism Review)