Notes from No Man's Land E-Book

Eula Biss

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

‘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

‘Notes from No Man’s Land is the most accomplished book of essays anyone has written or published so far in the twenty-first century. 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.’

— Kyle Minor, Salon

‘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

‘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 opening up 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

Praise for On Immunity

‘On Immunity is brave because it will attract hostility from those she implies are selfish or misguided in refusing to vaccinate. Her arguments are profoundly compelling, and her narratives are braided together with beauty and elegance. The book is itself an inoculation – it grafts and unites different traditions of the essay, and in doing so creates something stronger and more resilient. And its urgent message is an inoculation against ignorance and fearmongering: may it spread out through the world, bringing substance and common sense to the vaccination debate.’

— Gavin Francis, Guardian

‘Eula Biss accomplishes two remarkable things in this book. She efficiently dismantles the wall between self-documentation and world-documentation. And she synthesizes a vast amount of information into the haunting and inescapable conclusion that “we are… continuous with everything here on earth, including – and especially – each other.”’

— Sarah Manguso, author of Ongoingness

‘Sontag said she wrote Illness as Metaphor to “calm the imagination, not to incite it,” and On Immunity also seeks to cool and console. But where Sontag was imperious, Biss is stealthy. She advances from all sides, like a chess player, drawing on science, myth, literature to herd us to the only logical end, to vaccinate.’

— Parul Sehgal, New York Times

‘On Immunity weaves metaphor and myth, science and sociology, philosophy and politics into a tapestry rich with insight and intelligence.’

— Jerome Groopman, New York Review of Books

‘A philosophical look at the history and practice of vaccination that reads like Joan Didion at her best. If you are yourself a nonfiction author, your initial response to this book might be to decide immediately on another line of work; Biss is that intimidatingly talented… This is cultural commentary at its highest level, a searching examination of the most profound issues of health, identity and the tensions between individual parenting decisions and society.’

— Michael Lindgren, Washington Post

‘On Immunity casts a spell… There’s a drama in watching this smart writer feel her way through this material. She’s a poet, an essayist, and a class spy. She digs honestly into her own psyche and into those of “people like me,” and she reveals herself as believer and apostate, moth and flame.’

— Dwight Garner, New York Times

‘An elegant, intelligent and very beautiful book, which occupies a space between research and reflection, investigating our attitudes toward immunity and inoculation through a personal and cultural lens.’

— David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

‘On Immunity is a history, a personal narrative, ultimately a powerful argument that reads, the whole time, like a poem. The book’s tone is so gentle and pleasant that you hardly realize you are being persuaded of something, but by the end you will contain new wisdom about bodies and community, and in this way the book earns its subtitle: an inoculation.’

— Rachel Riederer, Guernica

NOTES FROM NO MAN’S LAND AMERICAN ESSAYS

EULA BISS

For my son

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONBEFORETIME AND DISTANCE OVERCOMENEW YORKRELATIONSTHREE SONGS OF SALVAGELAND MINESGOODBYE TO ALL THATCALIFORNIABLACK NEWSLETTER TO MEXICOBABYLONTHE MIDWESTBACK TO BUXTONIS THIS KANSASNO MAN’S LANDNOBODY KNOWS YOUR NAMEAFTERALL APOLOGIESCODAMURDER MYSTERYNOTESACKNOWLEDGEMENTSCURRENT AND FORTHCOMING BOOKS BY FITZCARRALDO EDITIONSABOUT THE AUTHORCOPYRIGHT

BEFORE

TIME AND DISTANCE OVERCOME

“Of what use is such an invention?” the New York World asked shortly after Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated his telephone in 1876. The world was not waiting for the telephone.

Bell’s financial backers asked him not to work on his new invention because it seemed too dubious an investment. The idea on which the telephone depended—the idea that every home in the country could be connected by a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart—seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through a wire.

Even now it is an impossible idea, that we are all connected, all of us.

“At the present time we have a perfect network of gas pipes and water pipes throughout our large cities,” Bell wrote to his business partners in defense of his idea. “We have main pipes laid under the streets communicating by side pipes with the various dwellings…. In a similar manner it is conceivable that cables of telephone wires could be laid underground, or suspended overhead, communicating by branch wires with private dwellings, counting houses, shops, manufactories, etc., uniting them through the main cable.”