Notes from no man's land : American essays /
Eula Biss.
- 236 pages ; 21 cm
Originally published in 2009 by the same publisher. Copyright renewed 2018.
Before. Time and distance overcome -- New York. Relations ; Three songs of salvage ; Land mines ; Goodbye to all that -- California. Black news ; Letter to Mexico ; Babylon -- The Midwest. Back to Buxton ; Is this Kansas ; No man's land ; Nobody knows your name -- After. All apologies. Coda. Murder mystery.
"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."--Back cover.
National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, 2009 Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, 2009