Back: Essays on the Soul and Spine of America
About this audiobook
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.
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
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About the author
Lauren Michele Jackson is an author, national fellow, cultural critic, and academic. She is the author of White Negroes, which was short-listed for the 2020 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. She is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and a contributing writer for The New Yorker. Her essays and criticism have also been published in New York magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, 4Columns, Rolling Stone, and The Yale Review. She is an alumna of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and received her PhD in English from the University of Chicago. In 2025, Jackson was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, from the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in Chicago.
