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...

In this bold, fascinating book, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear – fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what may be in your children's air, food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines. Reflecting on her own experience as a new mother, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. She extends a conversation with other mothers to meditations on Voltaire's Candide...

The pathbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation.In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from t...

'A major achievement.' CLAUDIA RANKINE'Endlessly absorbing.' SINÉAD GLEESON'A probing tour of capitalism and class.' MAGGIE NELSON'Exhilarating.' JENNY OFFILLA personal reckoning with the intricacies of money, class and capitalism from the N ew York Times bestselling author.Having just purchased her first home, Eula Biss embarks on a r...

Now on ebook, the brilliant debut by Eula Biss, author of On Immunity and Notes from No Man's Land"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," writes Joan Didion, with a certain skepticism. We also live by the stories we tell. It is enough for the end of a fairy tale to read simply, ". . . then they were married." I suspect my father, among others, of marrying in order to locate himself within this kind of easy fairy tale.Availab...

Who is white, and why should we care? There was a time when the immigrants of New York City’s Lower East Side—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, the Russian Jews—were not white, but now “they” are. There was a time when the French-speaking working classes of Quebec were told to “speak white,” that is, to speak English. Whiteness is an allegorical category before it is demographic.This volume gathers together some of the most influential scholars of privilege and marginalization in...

Waveform celebrates the role of women essayists in contemporary literature. Historically, women have been instrumental in moving the essay to center stage, and Waveform continues this rich tradition, further expanding the dynamic genre’s boundaries and testing its edges. With thirty essays by thirty distinguished and diverse women writers, this carefully constructed anthology incorporates works ranging from the traditional to the experimental.Waveform champions th...

Upon becoming a new mother, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear—fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what is in your child's air, food, mattress, medicine, and vaccines. She finds that you cannot immunize your child, or yourself, from the world.In this bold, fascinating book, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. As she hears more and more fears abou...

Adrienne Rich's influential and landmark investigation concerns both the experience and the institution of motherhood.The experience is her own—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.

In this captivating fusion of science and personal memoir, writer David Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mindDavid has suffered from OCD for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn’t Stop is his honest attempt to understand the condition. At what point does a harmless idea become a blinding blizzard of unwanted thoughts? Drawing on the latest research on the brain, as well as historical accounts of patients and their treatments, this is a book that will challeng...

NPR Great Read of 2016Author and Guardian US columnist Jessica Valenti has been leading the national conversation on gender and politics for over a decade. Now, in a darkly funny and bracing memoir, Valenti explores the toll that sexism takes from the every day to the existential.Sex Object explores the painful, funny, embarrassing, and sometimes illegal moments that shaped Valenti’s adolescence and young adulthood in New York City, revealing a muc...

Atlas Obscura says this lushly illustrated New York Times bestselling guide to dozens of dangerous, eerie, and infamous locations is the perfect gift for "those who believe the world is still full of mysteries to investigate."Pick up the acclaimed Atlas of Cursed Places and visit the world's most nerve-wracking locations. With pithy historical profiles, vintage full-color maps, and haunting tales that wil...