Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
Acclaimed for its frank and fascinating investigation of racial
identity, and reissued on its ten-year anniversary, Notes from No Man's
Land begins with a series of lynchings, ends with a list of apologies,
and in an unsettling new coda revisits a litany of murders that no one
seems capable of solving. Eula Biss explores race in America through 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 rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Rogers Park
neighborhood of Chicago. What she reveals is how families, schools,
communities, and our country participate in preserving white privilege.
Notes from No Man's Land is an essential portrait of America that
established Biss as one of the most distinctive and inventive essayists
of our time.