On becoming a new mother, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear—fear of the government, the medical establishment, what is in your child’s air, food, mattress, medicine, and vaccines. She finds that you cannot immunize your child, or yourself, from the world.
In this bold, fascinating book, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. As she hears more and more fears about vaccines, Biss researches what they mean for her own child, her immediate community, America and the world, historically and in the present moment. She extends a conversation with other mothers to meditations on Voltaire’s Candide, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors, and beyond. On Immunity is a moving account of how we are all interconnected—our bodies and our fates.
Blurbs
“Eula Biss sanely takes on the anti-vaccine mob.”—Vanity Fair
“Biss infuses her in-depth study on why we as a society fear vaccines with her own experiences with raising a child. She cites literary greats (Sontag, Stoker, Voltaire) on the topic of immunization, connecting literary history with our deep-rooted avoidance of protective shots.”—The Huffington Post, Best Books for Fall 2014
“With beautiful writing and a firm grounding in literature, class, and medicine, [Biss] successfully wrenches a divisive and surprisingly nuanced topic away from our loudest, dumbest voices. (Spoiler: She supports vaccination.) You’ll never look at swine flu, childbirth, or vampires in the same way again.”—Vulture, “8 Books You Need to Read This September”
“A brilliant and empathetic exploration of the vaccine wars, at once entertaining and useful, for parents or anyone else seeking a more complex understanding of immunology and vaccines. Biss’s respectful argument for continued childhood inoculation makes her book—full of scintillating narratives, riveting bits of history, and touching memoirs that can be relished for their own sake—one that all vaccine skeptics should read.”—The American Scholar
“[A] far-reaching and unusual investigation into immunity. . . . Artfully mixing motherhood, myth, maladies, and metaphors into her presentation, Biss transcends medical science and trepidation.”—Booklist, starred review
Eula Biss holds a BA in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her second book, Notes from No Man’s Land, received the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her work has also been recognized by a Pushcart Prize, a Jaffe Writers’ Award, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. She teaches writing at Northwestern University and is working on a new book about myth and metaphor in medicine with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Howard Foundation Fellowship. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Best Creative Nonfictionand the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction as well as in the Believer, Gulf Coast, Columbia, Ninth Letter, North American Review, Bellingham Review, Seneca Review, and Harper’s.
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California by Edan Lepucki
The world Cal and Frida have always known is gone, and they’ve left the crumbling city of Los Angeles far behind them. They now live in a shack in the wilderness, working side-by-side to make their days tolerable in the face of hardship and isolation. Mourning a past they can’t reclaim, they seek solace in each other. But the tentative existence they’ve built for themselves is thrown into doubt when Frida finds out she’s pregnant.
Terrified of the unknown and unsure of their ability to raise a child alone, Cal and Frida set out for the nearest settlement, a guarded and paranoid community with dark secrets. These people can offer them security, but Cal and Frida soon realize this community poses dangers of its own. In this unfamiliar world, where everything and everyone can be perceived as a threat, the couple must quickly decide whom to trust.
A gripping and provocative debut novel by a stunning new talent, California imagines a frighteningly realistic near future, in which clashes between mankind’s dark nature and deep-seated resilience force us to question how far we will go to protect the ones we love.
“In her arresting debut novel, Edan Lepucki conjures a lush, intricate, deeply disturbing vision of the future, then masterfully exploits its dramatic possibilities.” —Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad
“Rewarding….[One of] 30 books you NEED to read in 2014.” —Huffington Post
“An expansive, full-bodied and masterful narrative of humans caught in the most extreme situations, with all of our virtues and failings on full display: courage, cowardice, trust, betrayal, honor and expedience. The final eighty pages of this book gripped me as much as any fictional denouement I’ve encountered in recent years….I firmly believe that Edan Lepucki is on the cusp of a long, strong career in American letters.” (author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Brief Encounters with Che Guevara).
“Edan Lepucki’s first novel comes steeped in Southern California literary tradition….One thinks of Steve Erickson or Cynthia Kadohata, or Carolyn See, whose 1987 novel Golden Days ends with the nuclear holocaust.” —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“Stunning and brilliant novel, which is a wholly original take on the post-apocalypse genre, an end-of-the-world we’ve never seen before and yet is uncomfortably believable and recognizable. By turns funny and heartbreaking, scary and tender, beautifully written and compulsively page-turning, this is a book that will haunt me, and that I’ll be thankful to return to in the years to come. It left me speechless. Read it, and prepare yourself.” (author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake).
“Noteworthy….Lepucki’s debut is an inventive take on the post-apocalyptic novel, about a couple who moves from an isolated existence in the wilderness to a guarded community that, they soon realize, harbors terrifying secrets and unforseen dangers.” —Laura Pearson, Time Out Chicago
“Edan Lepucki is the very best kind of writer: simultaneously generous and precise. I am long been an admirer of her prose, but this book—this book, this massive, brilliant book—is a four alarm fire, the ambitious and rich introduction that a writer of her caliber deserves. I can’t wait for the world to know what I have known for so many years, that Edan Lepucki is the real thing, and that we will all be bowing at her feet before long.” (author of Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures).
“In her arresting debut novel, Edan Lepucki conjures a lush, intricate, deeply disturbing vision of the future, then masterfully exploits its dramatic possibilities.” —Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad
“When the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper, you want a guide whose insight into the subtle revolutions of the heart are as nuanced as her perceptions about the broken world are astute. In prose witty, seductive, and exacting, Lepucki reminds us that, in the after-life of social collapse, it’s not only the strongest willed, but the most compassionate among us, who must rebuild. California is an epic of interiors.” (author of Forecast).
“An expansive, full-bodied and masterful narrative of humans caught in the most extreme situations, with all of our virtues and failings on full display: courage, cowardice, trust, betrayal, honor and expedience. The final eighty pages of this book gripped me as much as any fictional denouement I’ve encountered in recent years….I firmly believe that Edan Lepucki is on the cusp of a long, strong career in American letters.” —Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
“Stunning and brilliant novel, which is a wholly original take on the post-apocalypse genre, an end-of-the-world we’ve never seen before and yet is uncomfortably believable and recognizable. By turns funny and heartbreaking, scary and tender, beautifully written and compulsively page-turning, this is a book that will haunt me, and that I’ll be thankful to return to in the years to come. It left me speechless. Read it, and prepare yourself.” —Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply
“This thrilling and thoughtful debut novel by Edan Lepucki follows a young married couple navigating dangers both physical and emotional in a wild, mysterious post-collapse America. It’s a vivid, believable picture of a not-so-distant future and the timeless negotiation of young marriage, handled with suspense and psychological acuity.” —Janet Fitch, author of Paint it Black
“Edan Lepucki is the very best kind of writer: simultaneously generous and precise. I am long been an admirer of her prose, but this book—this book, this massive, brilliant book—is a four alarm fire, the ambitious and rich introduction that a writer of her caliber deserves. I can’t wait for the world to know what I have known for so many years, that Edan Lepucki is the real thing, and that we will all be bowing at her feet before long.” —Emma Straub, author of Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures
“When the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper, you want a guide whose insight into the subtle revolutions of the heart are as nuanced as her perceptions about the broken world are astute. In prose witty, seductive, and exacting, Lepucki reminds us that, in the after-life of social collapse, it’s not only the strongest willed, but the most compassionate among us, who must rebuild. California is an epic of interiors.” —Shya Scanlon, author of Forecast
“It’s tempting to call this novel post-apocalyptic, but really, it’s about an apocalypse in progress, an apocalypse that might already be happening, one that doesn’t so much break life into before and after as unravel it bit by bit. Edan Lepucki tells her tale with preternatural clarity and total believability, in large part by focusing on the relationships — between husband and wife, brother and sister, parent and child — that are, it turns out, apocalypse-proof. Post-nothing. California is timeless.” —Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
“There’s been no shortage of apocalyptic scenarios in our recent literature. What makes Edan Lepucki’s novel so stunning is that her survivors don’t merely resemble us, they are us, in their emotional particularity and dilemmas. The result is a book as terse and terrifying as the best of Shirley Jackson, on the one hand, and as clear-eyed and profound a portrait of a marriage as Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, on the other. California is superb.” —Matthew Specktor, author of The American Dream Machine
“In her remarkable debut California, Edan Lepucki has conjured a post-apocalyptic vision that is honest, frightening, and altogether too realistic. At times disturbing and often heartbreaking, California is an original examination of the limitations of family and loyalty in a world on the verge of collapse.” —Ivy Pochoda, author of Visitation Street
“Edan Lepucki’s novel California kept me up for five nights. This was a problem. However, I was not just tired, but often worried for the characters, for our world, and then astonished and laughing at her skill with humor and lyricism even in the fearful landscape. It’s a ruined place, yes, but the bonds of family, and the betrayal of blood, are as true as every in her surprising imagery and her complicated humans, who could be any of us.” —Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales
“Breathtakingly original, fearless and inventive, pitch perfect in its portrayal of the intimacies and tiny betrayals of marriage, so utterly gripping it demands to be read in one sitting: Edan Lepucki’s California is the novel you have been waiting for, the novel that perfectly captures the hopes and anxieties of contemporary America. This is a novel that resonates on every level, a novel that stays with you for a lifetime. Read it now.” —Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age
“California is carefully drawn and beautifully textured. It’s a pleasure to watch love and family transform in this dark, strange forest.” —Ramona Ausubel, author of A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us
“California is a wonder: a big, gripping and inventive story built on quiet, precise human moments. Edan Lepucki’s eerie near future is vividly and persuasively imagined. She is a fierce new presence in American fiction.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia
Edan Lepucki is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a staff writer for The Millions. Her short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s and Narrative Magazine, among other publications, and she is the founder and director of Writing Workshops Los Angeles. This is her first novel.
Someone Else’s Wedding Vows reflects on the different forms of love, which can be both tremendously joyous and devastatingly destructive. The title poem confronts a human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with a strange human hopefulness. In this vein, Stone explores our everyday patterns and customs, and in doing so, exposes them for their complexities. Drawing on the neurological, scientific, psychological, and even supernatural, this collection confronts the difficulties of love and family. Stone rankles with a desire to understand, but the questions she asks are never answered simply. These poems stroll along the abyss, pointing towards the absurdity of our choices. They recede into the imaginative in order to understand and translate the distressing nature of reality. It is a bittersweet question this book raises: Why we are like this? There is no easy answer. So while we look down at our hands, perplexed, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows raises a glass to the future.
“Stone’s poems astutely and honestly address the longing and cost of human connections.” —Publishers Weekly
“Bianca Stone’s poems are powerful, moving, and original. There is an amazing image center in her brain! Her brain (psyche, heart) can wrestle the matter of life to the ground (a pleasure for matter), and shapechange with it, and it does not give up its ghost but reveals, in joy and sorrow, its spirit.Stone’s poems are highly charged, lively, and interesting. They are fiercely anti-sentimental, and emotionally generous. They have a distinctive underlying grieving compassion. I see in her work the natural weirdness and leaping of our minds. But wilder! It’s as if she can take her mind out of gear, out of its prosaic limitations, and overhear, and sing, the strange true thoughts and feelings we have when we’re at our most genuine and unprotected. In her poems we’re in the presence of a naked human voice, not concealing itself—or over-reaching to expose itself—which dives as deep as voices go.” —Sharon Olds, Pulitzer-Prize–winning author of Stag’s Leap
“Let’s say hypersensitivity ranks high up among poetry’s necessary attributes. Let’s say that to ride the back of a parable and make it past the bell rates further fervent notice, and let’s say we want to pay attention to a poet who says we will perceive our own pain in others/and we will know if we are capable of loving them. Open the book, read this poem: ‘Reading a Science Article on the Airplane to JFK,’ and then I’m confident you’ll want to spend a lot of time with Bianca Stone’s astonishing debut book.” —Dara Wier, author of Remnants of Hannah
“I read the work of our most brilliant young poets to be reminded that it is still possible, despite everything, for our abused and decimated language to ring out the difficult truths of full-on awareness. The best of them, like Bianca Stone, do not settle for mere cleverness. They know it is not enough to be brilliant, that it is essential in poetry not merely to report the miseries and blessings, but to transform them. When she says, ‘I saw the devil with his stitching techniques/textiles and shadow/saw his hands that never stopped’ or ‘I found a small notebook called The People of Distress,’ I really believe her, and believe she is going to the difficult places and writing these poems in service not just to herself, but to us all, so that we can go to them and together find a little hope.” —Matthew Zapruder, author of Come on All You Ghosts
“Bianca Stone’s poetry has the glow of 21st-century enlightenment and lyric possession. Hilarious and powerful, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows will have you come to terms with the vehemence of her magic.” —Major Jackson, author of Holding Company
The rise of Australopithecus. The weird clouds over Long Island at the classic wedding. The crowd frightened of what it means having O’Hara’s avocado salad poem read. It’s an evil waste of time for me to congratulate anything. Accuracy comes to me, slips out in fragments of my earlier works recited in the secret weapon defense committees. I am president of the clams. Seduced by foodservice; purple squid sinking in their own pitiful mantle, irrevocable among the dinner rolls. I would pay to feel good all the time. But I’m telling stories to the churchless evening, watching lost guests take paper plates to inoffensive tables illuminated with Greta Garbo centerpieces. Bring me to the oak out front and tell me you love me I say to the family dog. The pool is lit with unscented candles. Hillery stands on a chair; we’re taking the wedding photographs, practicing someone else’s dutiful permanence. Clusters of sequin around the bar; hand reaches around a white waist and considers literature for the first time in months— this is the sea that arranges inside us, the burning ship that drifts with its burning, anxious crew— the rest we can sum up in several lines about perpetuity. The rest we can owe to our complex digestive systems working out the squid covered in light-reflective cells, changing color according to the gut which humans will someday be able to do. This is a colder evening in September. The sun drapes its modern dread across everything. The front lawn has never had its chance with violent, unkempt beauty— but something dark stirs in the incipient mums. I want to embrace whatever is firmer and bigger than myself. Like the sound of the wind around the tent or everyone inventing their own colloquial happiness, acting out, too bored or wired with rancor to stop eating. And it’s true I spent my whole life in fear of sharing my mind but with a longing for it to be taken. Year after year I could not even order myself to be touched. I became a waitress who looked sad, dropping occasionally into the bed of a maniac, who looked sadder and meaner. I should have gone out into the field every night to watch black bears growl in honeysuckle. Or absorbed myself in the essays of Empson, which I never finished. I’m still somewhere in the mountains of Vermont, exhibiting relatively high intelligence. Somewhere I’m communicating. And where it’s driest I sit down with my wet drink. I drink for the incidental. The heart of dust. For my family and all their uneven moods. For this audience of discreet psychotics poising for photographs. For the living deer ravaging gardens. For the touch of sub-shrubs: lavender, periwinkle and thyme— touching the lingering otherness— for this not being known, rarely knowing and for the ordinary monstrous knowing I love.
Heavily influenced by a family of writers and artists, including the late poet Ruth Stone, Bianca Stone began writing poems at a very early age. She collaborated with the poet and essayist Anne Carson on Antigonick, published by New Directions in 2012. She lives in New York City.
Eula Biss holds a BA in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her second book, Notes from No Man’s Land, received the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her work has also been recognized by a Pushcart Prize, a Jaffe Writers’ Award, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. She teaches writing at Northwestern University and is working on a new book about myth and metaphor in medicine with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Howard Foundation Fellowship. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Best Creative Nonfiction and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction as well as in the Believer, Gulf Coast, Columbia, Ninth Letter, North American Review, Bellingham Review, Seneca Review, and Harper’s.
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