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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 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.
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 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.
- GenresNonfictionEssays
238 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 13, 2026
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This essay collection was fantastic! It reminded me of Imani Perry’s Black and Blue in how it took a single theme or motif and used to discuss its connection to culture. Jackson demonstrates her intelligence and research, but the book doesn’t feel academic. The prose is lyrical and engaging. An absolute joy to read. I learned so much and felt so many emotions reading this book. This is a must read for anyone interested in culture, history, art, and even law.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review