It is no accident that Having and Being Had reads like the poems money would write if money wrote poems. And a wry, vivd assessment of our spiritual moment. ‘A meditation on race, consumerism and the American caste system. ‘No contemporary writer I know explores and confronts her own societal responsibilities better than Eula Biss.’ A brilliant, lacerating re-examination of our relationship to what we own and why, and who in turn might own us.’ ‘Eula Biss’s prescient new book gave me new language for things I didn’t know I felt. Biss’ sentences have retained a poet’s precision.’ ‘Calls on the controlled rush of poetry and turns experience into art.’ Having and Being Had is meant to be the kind of book most authors have dreamed of: one that does not sacrifice any of the writer’s egalitarian, socialist principles while nevertheless.

if you are not deeply discomfited by the time you finish reading On Having and Being Had, you have no conscience.’ In Having and Being Had, both gifts are on display.

Her other talent is for laying bare our submerged fears. The first is her ability to reveal to the reader what has, all along, been hidden in plain sight. Eula Biss is the author of three books, including the New York Times bestseller On Immunity: An Inoculation, which was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review, and Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. ‘As a writer Eula Biss has two great gifts. Playfully ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokémon, across bars and laundromats and universities, she asks, of both herself and her class, ‘In what have we invested? The result is Having and Being Had: a radical interrogation of work, leisure and capitalism. Having just purchased her first home, Eula Biss embarks on a roguish and risky self-audit of the value system she has bought into. ‘A probing tour of capitalism and class.’ MAGGIE NELSONĪ personal reckoning with the intricacies of money, class and capitalism from the N ew York Times bestselling author.

Eula biss having and being had