Michelle Orange uses the lens of pop culture to decode the defining characteristics of our media-drenched times

InThis Is Running for Your Life, Michelle Orange takes us from Beirut to Hawaii to her grandmother's retirement home in Canada in her quest to understand how people behave in a world increasingly mediated—for better and for worse—by images and interactivity. Orange's essays range from the critical to the journalistic to the deeply personal; she seamlessly combines stories from her own life with incisive analysis as she explores everything from the intimacies we develop with celebrities and movie characters to the troubled creation of the most recent edition of theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
With the insight of a young Joan Didion and the empathy of a John Jeremiah Sullivan, Orange dives into popular culture and the status quo and emerges with a persuasive and provocative book about how we live now. Her singular voice will resonate for years to come.

MICHELLE ORANGE was born and raised in London, Ontario. She worked as a producer in the education and children’s divisions of TV Ontario and then joined the graduate film studies program at New York University. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the New York Times, the New Yorker and other publications. She is a faculty mentor in the graduate writing program at Goucher College and an adjunct assistant professor of writing at Columbia University. Orange has been an invited guest and speaker at various institutions including Yale University, New York University and the University of Western Ontario. This Is Running for Your Life, her book of essays, was named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, the National Post, Flavorwire and other publications.

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"I haven't read anyone who writes more incisively and provocatively about the way we live now than Michelle Orange. She's&nbspa master essayist and&nbspour very best modern critic." -Steven Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries &nbsp