Élu par le Publishers’ Weekly comme l’un des dix meilleurs titres de 2014 tous genres confondus, l’essai d’Eula Biss, ON IMMUNITY: AN INOCULATION, publié par Graywolf en septembre 2014, après des éloges unanimes recueillis dans la presse américaine, continue à faire parler de lui.
Finaliste du NBCC Award 2015, décerné le jeudi 12 mars prochain, ON IMMUNITY est à ce jour vendu dans plusieurs pays : Australie/Nouvelle Zélande (Text Publishing), en Chine (Guangxi), en Corée (Open Book), en Espagne (Dioptras), en Italie (Ponte alle Grazie), en Pologne (MT Biznes), au Royaume-Uni (Fitzcarraldo) et à Taïwan (As If). En Allemagne, des négociations sont en cours.
Why do we fear vaccines? A provocative examination by Eula Biss, the author of Notes from No Man’s Land, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
ON IMMUNITY:
An Inoculation
by Eula Biss
Graywolf Press, September 2014
Subtle, spellbinding. . . . Sontag said she wrote Illness as Metaphor to ‘calm the imagination, not to incite it,’ and On Immunity also seeks to cool and console. But where Sontag was imperious, Biss is stealthy. She advances from all sides, like a chess player, drawing on science, myth, literature to herd us to the only logical end, to vaccinate. – Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Books Review
A book-length cultural exploration of vaccination, parenthood, public health, and the body as metaphor.
Includes narratives about Biss’s son’s acquisition of language through bodily metaphor, the personal politics of vaccination, the history of conscientious objection, vampires and the rise of inoculation in 19th century England, predatory capitalism, gender and sexism in medicine, body and environmental pollution, bloodbanking, and many other wide ranging topics woven together with Biss’s fierce intelligence and supple prose. The result is a sprawling but controlled tour de force by one of America’s leading literary nonfiction practitioners.
Eula Biss’s second book, Notes from NoMan’s Land, received the Graywolf PressNonfiction Prize and the National BookCritics Circle Award for criticism. Her workhas also been recognized by a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and a21st Century Award from the ChicagoPublic Library as well as Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships.
