Back: Essays on the Soul and Spine of America

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

Moving across literature, film, sport, visual art, and U.S. history, Jackson probes how the back 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 conversatio...