Eula Biss Archive

Tending the Shared Garden of Immunity

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
In trying to understand immunity as concept and metaphor, Eula Biss’s 2014 book reveals the profound ethical dilemma that has always inscribed itself into the vaccination debate, which, at root, is about the relationship between self and other, between individual bodies and the social body.

Review: TALES OF TWO AMERICAS edited by John Freeman

Tale of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation  Edited by John Freeman Penguin; Sept 2017 252 pp; $17 Buy: paperback | eBook Reviewed by Anne Kniggendorf In his collection of 36 essays, poems, and stories entitled Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided

Como la flor: Statues and Civic Identity in Texas

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
It’s interesting to think about whom cities choose (or not) to memorialize. Of course cities want to associate themselves with the celebrities who were born or lived within their limits. But statues are also places where, to borrow a phrase from Eula Biss, “a city’s imagination resides.”

Morphology of the Essay: Ander Monson, Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, & Maggie Nelson

Author: | Categories: Reading, Writing No comments
According to Wikipedia, a keystone is “used figuratively to refer to a central element of a larger structure […] that locks the other elements in place and allows the whole to be self-supporting.” With a stone archway, the form is inherent, or predetermined. First, there is the abutment, then

The Narrowed Divide: Of Stylists, Shape-Shifters, and Multiple Aesthetics

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
  Our collective understanding of how a story, poem, or essay should operate remains in constant flux; every sentence is a new description of language, every piece of writing, a new commentary on art. In this sense, any shared definition of storytelling is best left unresolved, unless we are