Island in the City

Micah McCrary’s work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Rumpus, Midwestern Gothic, Identity Theory, and Third Coast. He is an assistant editor at Hotel Amerika, a contributing editor at Assay, and a founding coeditor of con•text. A teaching associate and PhD candidate in English at Ohio University, he holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia College Chicago.

• AcknowledgmentsNORMALOreoPostures of PrivilegeTo Rebel against MenEver the MothCHICAGOMetropolisGreen and GrayGeraldyne's RoomTwo CitiesPlayground CityPRAGUESnow Globe BohemiaIsland in the CityA Good Fake CzechCabaretAn Idea of PragueEpilogueWorks Cited

"In the latest entry in the publisher's American Lives series, McCrary writes of becoming aware of his black heritage early in life but also about the impression his skin color had on others in small-town Normal, Illinois, in the 1980s and '90s. . . . A slim yet potent and intimately ruminative debut memoir on travel, maturity, and culture."-Kirkus “In Island in the City Micah McCrary dares over and over again to articulate the consequences of race, place, and the perils of having a sensitive and very particular sentience. Daring nonfiction is never quite normal; it is always an island in a city of conventional thought. McCrary’s work gives the reader this refuge and this challenge.”-David Lazar, author of I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms “In these searching essays Micah McCrary takes us from Normal-both the place and the idea-to Chicago and Prague as he reckons with race, sex, money, and what it means to be at home.”-Eula Biss, author of On Immunity: An Inoculation