Maggie Nelson

"Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color."

Bluets

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family.

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.

Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

A Memoir

The Argonauts

A fresh new voice in art and cultural criticism takes on the day's most pressing questions about representations of violence in art. Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

A Reckoning

The Art of Cruelty

Documents how the murder case of the author's aunt was reopened more than three decades later upon the discovery of new DNA findings, describing how the subsequent investigation and trial reopened long-standing wounds for the author and her family. By the author of Jane: A Murder. 40,000 first printing.

The Red Parts

An expansive, exhilarating work of criticism by one of the most significant writers of our day So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom’s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate. Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing “practices of freedom” by which we negotiate our interrelation with—indeed, our inseparability from—others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion. For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture—from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis—is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.

Four Songs of Care and Constraint

On Freedom

A Murder (Soft Skull ShortLit)

Jane

Maggie Nelson’s fourth collection of poems combines a wanderer’s attention to landscape with a deeply personal exploration of desire, heartbreak, resilience, accident, and flux. Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight — of feeling lost, then found, then lost again. The book’s three sections range widely, and include a long sequence of Niedecker-esque meditations written at the shore of a polluted urban canal, a harrowing long poem written at a friend’s hospital bedside, and a series of unsparing, crystalline lyrics honoring the conjoined forces of love and sorrow. Whatever the style, the poems are linked by Nelson’s singular poetic voice, as sly and exacting as it is raw. The collection is a testament to Nelson’s steadfast commitment to chart the facts of feeling, whatever they are, and at whatever the cost.

Something Bright, Then Holes

The author chronicles the brutal rape and murder of her aunt in a collage of hard-hitting poems, Jane's actual diaries, dream accounts, and documentary sources, reconstructing the traumatic event and its long legacy within the author's family. Original.

A Murder

Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation - Olivia Laing Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of 'pillow book' about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend. The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability of pleasure and pain, and to the question of what role, if any, aesthetic beauty can play in times of great heartache or grief. Much like Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, Bluets has passed between lovers in the ecstasy of new love, and been pressed into the hands of the heartbroken. Visceral, learned, and acutely lucid, Bluets is a slim feat of literary innovation and grace, never before published in the UK.

Tells the story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson's aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969, via a collage of poetry and prose.

Poetry. "Maggie Nelson has such drive in her language. Things do not dangle off this drive, but rather get resolutely pushed aside by her poem's forward motion. Also, she exercises the infinitesimal pause that is great poetry. Her SHINER is totally cool. She delivers the goods with fiendish delight"--Eileen Myles.

Shiner

Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell as well as a reconsideration of the work of many male New York School writers and artists from a feminist perspective.

Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions

Essays and Conversations

Like Love

Poetry. "These poems manage to say everything about everything--each determining day, each shifting sense of inexhaustible person. Back of it all is an extraordinary ear for the way words find place, make a passage from here to there, blessedly keep on talking"--Robert Creeley. "Few poets are strange and quick enough to capture the frenetic quality of contemporary life. Her poems move fast, think on their feet, hit and run with equal parts of humor, glamour, and horror. In every way, she is a thoroughly original voice for our time"--Elaine Equi.

The Latest Winter

Argonauci

»En rakt igenom sensationell bok. Jag läste den med känslan av att för första gången stöta på en riktigt stor, samtida tänkare.« | Madelaine Levy, SvD »Årets mest omvälvande läsning.« | The Atlantic Argonauterna är en memoar som inte upprepar de vanliga formerna för varken kärlekshistorier eller biografier. I stället låter författaren sin egen personliga historia framträda i dialoger med de etablerade teorierna i ämnen som kärlek, begär, identitet, kön, sexualitet, äktenskap och barnuppfostran, på ett sätt som synliggör gränserna för vad kärlek i dag är eller tillåts vara. I centrum för berättelsen finns författarens relation till konstnären Harry Dodge, som är gender-fluid och under bokens gång påbörjar testosteroninjektioner. Och vi följer i samband med det hur berättaren genomgår en graviditet. Likt argonauternas skepp Argo i den grekiska mytologin, som bit för bit byts ut under resans gång men likväl behåller sitt namn och sin identitet, klargör Nelsons gestalter hur kärleken villkoras av ständig förändring – och hur omvänt all förändring villkoras av kärlek. Nelsons kompromisslösa och genreöverskridande Argonauterna har jämförts med Roland Barthes och Susan Sontags mest banbrytande verk. Kritiker i både USA och Europa har hyllat den som ett mästerverk. Här i svensk översättning av Karin Lindeqvist. MAGGIE NELSON [f. 1973] är en amerikansk författare, poet och forskare, bosatt i Los Angeles. Nelson undervisar även i kreativt skrivande på California Institute of the Arts. »Boken är med sina 160 sidor obegripligt rik. En sensation.« | Victor Malm, Expressen »Nelson dödar gamla ingrodda föreställningar om kön, äktenskap och sexualitet, med poesi, intellektuell fräckhet och en hjärtklingande ärlighet.« | Vanity Fair »Liknar ingenting du läst.« | Buzzfeed »Argonauterna utgör en magnifik gärning av tänkande, omsorg och konst.« | Los Angeles Times »Våldsamt provokativ, och intellektuellt fräck memoar. Författaren vänder ut och in på moderskapet som koncept, utforskande varje tänkbart perspektiv, osäkrar alla distinktioner inom fält som det politiska, filosofiska, estetiska och personliga. En bok som kommer att utmana sina läsare lika mycket som författaren utmanat sig själv.« | Kirkus Reviews »Ärlig, smart, subtil.« | Jezebel »Maggie Nelson är en av de hetaste författarna i USA just nu, en av de skarpaste och spänstigaste tänkarna i sin generation. Musikalisk, polyfonisk; fruktbar, generös – den här boken bör vara självklar i hyllan hos varje människa som begär något, och särskilt ifall detta begär är lika med frihet.« | The Guardian »Argonauterna är en rörande undersökning av familj och kärlek, men också en meditation över frestelsen, motsägelsen, begränsningen och skönheten i att vara normal, som människa och som konstnär.« | The New Yorker

Maggie Nelson

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