“My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,” Eula Biss writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges, she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism. Described by the New York Times as a writer who “advances from all sides, like a chess player,” Biss offers an uncommonly immersive and deeply revealing new portrait of work and luxury, of accumulation and consumption, of the value of time and how we spend it. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, Biss asks, of both herself and her class, “In what have we invested?”

Upon becoming a new mother, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear --- fear of the government, the medical establishment, and 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 ON IMMUNITY, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body.