Notes from No Man's Land
Eula Biss · 2009
NBCC Award winner. Essays on race, whiteness, and American geography that are formally inventive and historically rigorous. Biss asks what it means to be white in America with more honesty than almost anyone.
The case against
Juxtaposition does work that argument should be doing: telephone poles braided with lynchings, Laura Ingalls Wilder with Rogers Park gentrification, and the connections are gestured at rather than earned. Biss's cool reticence is a style, but on this subject it can read as self-protection, the white observer arranging horrors at a careful aesthetic distance.
Essays · the Pro canon
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