Having and Being Had

'A major achievement.' CLAUDIA RANKINE

'Endlessly absorbing.' SINÉAD GLEESON



'A probing tour of capitalism and class.' MAGGIE NELSON



'Exhilarating.' JENNY OFFILL

A personal reckoning with the intricacies of money, class and capitalism from the New York Times bestselling author.



Having just purchased her first home, Eula Biss embarks on a roguish and risky self-audit of the value system she has bought into. The result is Having and Being Had: a radical interrogation of work, leisure and capitalism. 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?



'As a writer Eula Biss has two great gifts. The first is her ability to reveal to the reader what has, all along, been hidden in plain sight . . . Her other talent is for laying bare our submerged fears . . . In Having and Being Had, both gifts are on display . . . if you are not deeply discomfited by the time you finish reading On Having and Being Had, you have no conscience.'

AMINATTA FORNA, GUARDIAN





'Calls on the controlled rush of poetry and turns experience into art.'

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT





'Nuanced . . . Biss' sentences have retained a poet's precision.'

IRISH TIMES





'Eula Biss's prescient new book gave me new language for things I didn't know I felt . . . A brilliant, lacerating re-examination of our relationship to what we own and why, and who in turn might own us.'

ALEXANDER CHEE





'No contemporary writer I know explores and confronts her own societal responsibilities better than Eula Biss.'

ALEKSANDER HEMON





'A meditation on race, consumerism and the American caste system. And a wry, vivd assessment of our spiritual moment. It is no accident that Having and Being Had reads like the poems money would write if money wrote poems.'

JEET THAYIL



Eula Biss is an essayist and author of On Immunity: An Inoculation, which was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review. Her second book, Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 2010. Her first book, The Balloonists, was published in 2002. Her writing has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, an NEA Literature Fellowship, and a Jaffe Writers' Award. She holds a B.A. in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and a M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her essays have recently appeared in The Believer, Harper's, and The New York Times Magazine.