Back

Acclaimed New Yorker contributor Lauren Michele Jackson delivers an essay collection devoted to the back—and the conflicting ideas we load onto it.

Moving across literature, film, sport, visual art, and U.S. history, Jackson probes how the back has carries powerful ideas about beauty, gender, labor, race, and political solidarity. Here the back emerges as a site of vulnerability and desire, embodiment and rhetoric, dependence and resistance.

Jackson’s prose effortlessly shifts between conversational and intellectual, inviting readers into digressions that illuminate rather than distract in a set of ranging essays, alighting upon subjects such as bodybuilding, ballet, portrait photography, Gone With the Wind, horse racing, copyright law, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Back opens a broad door onto the body as both structure and metaphor, linking artistic and political representation through a mutual attention to what—and who—is made to bear weight.

Lauren Michele Jackson is an author, national fellow, cultural critic, and academic. She is the author of White Negroes, which was short-listed for the 2020 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. She is an assistant professor in the English and African American Studies departments at Northwestern University, a contributing writer for The New Yorker, and a fellow at New America. Her essays, and criticisms focus on culture, race, aesthetics in contemporary literature and popular culture and have also been published in New York, Harper’s Bazaar, and 4Columns. She is an alumna of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and received her PhD in English from the University of Chicago. For her fellowship, she worked on Back: An American Tale, a collection of essays on American history’s belabored cores. Jackson received the 2024 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle, for her work, including an essay on Percival Everett’s book James. She lives in Chicago.

• Publisher: Amistad
  
• Publish Date: October 13, 2026
  
• Pages: 240
  
• Language: English
  
• Type: Hardcover
  
• EAN/UPC: 9780063043909
  
• Dimensions: 8.3 in H | 5.5 in W | 0.8 in T | 1.4 lb Wt
  
• BISAC Categories: Literary Fiction, Arts & Hobbies, Politics, History