Eula Biss Wins Prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award
March 12, 2010--Graywolf Press is pleased to announce that
Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays by Eula Biss has been selected as the
winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The
winners were announced last night during a ceremony at the New School's Tishman
Auditorium.
Jeffrey Shotts, senior editor at Graywolf Press, was
thrilled with the news. "The NBCC Awards are one of the majors," he
said. "It's gratifying to have an award come out of such a large and
distinguished body of critics and writers and serious people about the art and
craft of literature. We couldn't
be prouder of Eula Biss."
Notes from No Man's Land: American
Essays was named a best book of the year by Time Out Chicago and a School
Library Journal Best Adult Book for High School Students. Biss's spare,
sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing
in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in
preserving racial privilege. National Public Radio called the collection
"forceful, beautiful essays," and the Chicago Tribune said "Biss
is telling us the story of our country--one we never saw coming." The book
won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Read more...
By Robert Bly and Tomas Transtromer "The poems of Tomas Transtromer are points of entry 'upward into/the
depths' of an imagination, a spirit that is regeneratively inventive,
capacious, unillusioned, undaunted, admirable." —The New York Times Book Review
By Debra Spark "What begins as something of a ghost story, a shaggy-menorah story,
winds up being a profound meditation on human hauntedness, the
inevitability of ghostliness and grief. This is a beautiful, wise, and
enormously moving novel." —David Shields
By Charles Baxter "Beautifully written essays that deftly explore the act of
memoir-making and the art of storytelling. Ranging from tales of trauma
and loss to quotidian and even banal events, they probe the tension
between memory and forgetting and the mysteries of how we do each." —Library Journal
