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 Alyson Hagy "A wonderful story collection, so brilliantly vivid, it is like a trip
to this pocket of the world so steeped in history and folklore. You can
hear the surf and smell the cut bait. And you can enter the lives of a
host of colorful characters, each expressing his or her own kind of
longing as well as a connection to this lush place."—Jill McCorkle
By W.D. Snodgrass "Shrewdly provocative, the anthology teaches and keeps on teaching....
letting poetry speak for itself and ward off amateurish interlopers." —Ruminator Review
By Tracy K. Smith "This is a smart, daring first book of poems. Driven by Smith's raging
desire of imagination, many of these often quiet poems describe
something that's not there with deft grammar reaching toward
possibility." —Listed as one of eight best poetry books in Black Issues Book Review
By William Stafford and Fred Marchant The unpublished early poems of William Stafford now added to "a body of work that represents some of the finest poetry written during the second half of [the twentieth] century." (Library Journal) Edited and with an introduction by Fred Marchant.
By Jessica Treadway Jessica Treadway seamlessly portrays the complexity of human experience
in the face of incomprehensible loss, revealing yet again why the New York Times Book Review has called her "a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth."
