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Recommendations

Fifteen non-fiction books to inspire you

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Features

How Maggie Nelson found freedom

Suzanne Dean on designing the cover for Maggie Nelson's Bluets

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Suzanne Dean on designing the cover of Bluets

Die Deeper into Life

Penguin Modern Poets 6

The Penguin Modern Poets are succinct, collectible, lovingly-assembled guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry, from the UK, America and beyond. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the seasoned poetry lover and the curious reader alike to encounter our most exciting new voices. 
 
Volume 6, Die Deeper into Life, features the work of Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine, the two American poets who, in hybrid books combining poetry, lyric prose, life-writing and theory such as Bluets, The Argonauts, Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, have transformed the literary landscape over the last 15 years, alongside that of the British poet, Denise Riley, who for decades has been exploring closely related concerns - motherhood; identity and oppression; loss; the language and words that build, or assault, our selves - and whose own work as a philosopher has been important for Nelson's writing. These are writers who combine deep thought with deep feeling to illuminate our world, how we suffer in it, how we resist it, and how we can live with and love it.

The Penguin Modern Poets are succinct, collectible, lovingly-assembled guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry, from the UK, America and beyond. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the seasoned poetry lover and the curious reader alike to encounter our most exciting new voices. 
 
Volume 6, Die Deeper into Life, features the work of Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine, the two American poets who, in hybrid books bridging the divide between poetry, lyric prose, life-writing and theory such as Bluets, The Argonauts, Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, have transformed the literary landscape over the last 15 years, alongside that of Denise Riley, who for decades has been exploring closely related concerns - motherhood; identity and oppression; loss; the language and words that build, or assault, our selves - as one of the best-kept secrets of British poetry, now fittingly recognized by a string of shortlistings and awards. These are writers who combine deep thought with deep feeling to illuminate our world, how we suffer in it, how we resist it, and how we can live with and love it.

Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic and the author of five books of non-fiction. Her books include the hybrid cult classic Bluets and The Argonauts (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), as well as four poetry collections. In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She currently lives in Los Angeles. 
 
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books, including the bestselling Citizen: An American Lyric. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is the winner of many prizes including a 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship. She is an adjunct professor of English and African-American Studies at Yale University. 
 
Denise Riley is a critically acclaimed writer of both philosophy and poetry. She is currently Professor of the History of Ideas and of Poetry at UEA. Her latest collection is Say Something Back (2016), for which she won the Roehampton Poetry Prize. She lives in London.

Autobiography of a Trial

The Red Parts

Selected as a Book of the Year 2017 in the Guardian 
 
'Maggie Nelson’s short, singular books feel pretty light in the hand... But in the head and the heart, they seem unfathomably vast, their cleverness and odd beauty lingering on' Observer 
 
In 1969, Jane Mixer, a first-year law student at the University of Michigan, posted a note on a student noticeboard to share a lift back to her hometown of Muskegon for spring break. She never made it: she was brutally murdered, her body found a few miles from campus the following day. 
 
The Red Parts is Maggie Nelson’s singular account of her aunt Jane’s death, and the trial that took place some 35 years afterward. Officially unsolved for decades, the case was reopened in 2004 after a DNA match identified a new suspect, who would soon be arrested and tried. In 2005, Nelson found herself attending the trial, and reflecting with fresh urgency on our relentless obsession with violence, particularly against women. 
 
 Resurrecting her interior world during the trial – in all its horror, grief, obsession, recklessness, scepticism and downright confusion – Maggie Nelson has produced a work of profound integrity and, in its subtle indeterminacy, deadly moral precision.

The genre-defying, thought-stirring memoir about America’s obsession with violence, from the critically acclaimed author of The Argonauts

A harrowing but clear-eyed examination of crime's emotional fallout

Maggie Nelson’s short, singular books feel pretty light in the hand... But in the head and the heart, they seem unfathomably vast, their cleverness and odd beauty lingering on...her work is blazingly intimate

Remarkable. I'm still reeling from its exhilarating brilliance

A book-long riff on the first-person essay that Joan Didion built... Nelson eschews tidy resolution. She argues that stories are by nature imperfect – and yet she also shows us how they can become totally worthwhile

In writing The Red Parts, Nelson has made her own box holding the fragments of many things. It’s not a beautiful object, but a valuable, coolly shimmering one, which captures the raw bewilderment that can affect a family for generations after a violent loss

There is something daring in the intimacy of Nelson’s work... Her books, five works of nonfiction and four books of poetry, are light in your hands but heavy and powerful in all the nonliteral senses

Nelson balances starkness with sensitivity and salvages beauty from trauma, while also perverting every strong statement – arguing, softly, against absolutes in general and her own convictions in particular…uncertainty and vulnerability are what is so special about Nelson’s writing... The result is a victim impact statement as complex and perplexing as the case itself… By bouncing everything through the prism of her strong relations; by refusing to be intimidated by originality, Nelson is a true original

Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation

Nelson is candid, funny and – for many years a poet – has a talent for compression and juxtaposition that makes for an enthralling use of language

It’s Nelson’s articulation of her many selves – the poet who writes prose; the memoirist who considers the truth specious; the essayist whose books amount to a kind of fairy tale, in which the protagonist goes from darkness to light, and then falls in love with a singular knight – that makes her readers feel hopeful

Nelson’s cathartic narrative encompasses closure of unrelated events in her own life, such as mourning her dead father, dealing with a recent heartache and reconciling with her once-wayward sister. Her narrative is wrenching

There’s no one quite like Maggie Nelson writing right now... We are lucky to have her

A memoir by a very cool writer – Maggie Nelson reminds me a bit of Joan Didion… Grim, but very well told.

Nelson confronts both her own and society’s disquieting fascination with the murder of pretty white women – as well as memory of her father’s sudden death…and the way such ruptures inspire a craving for story-making, catharsis, justice and reassuringly tidy ethical lines

In this powerful book, Nelson examines the unsolved murder of the aunt she never knew… Part memoir, part true crime, it’s a fiercely intelligent — and sometimes painfully honest — look at the criminal justice system… It’s also a frank appraisal of family relationships… and our inability, as a society, to look beyond our obsession with the murder of young women to find a solution to its cause… Written in a strong, evocative voice, often confessional and occasionally shocking, The Red Parts is a compelling, exhilarating and “unputdownable” read… It is thought-provoking, hard-hitting, wise and gentle, funny and searing, detached and emotional — all at the same time — and is written in such beautiful, eloquent language… it has the feel of an impossibly perfect book. As a meditation on violence and its long-lasting effects, it is superb; as an account of one family’s grief, it is profound.

A harrowing but clear-eyed examination of crime’s emotional fallout.

AS SEEN ON BBC2’S BETWEEN THE COVERS

Bluets

**AS SEEN ON BBC2's BETWEEN THE COVERS** 
 
A Guardian Book of the Year 
 
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.

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 
 
A Guardian Book of the Year

Transcendent.... very inspiring. She’s an amazing writer.

Maggie Nelson... She's so much better than anything I've read for a long, long time.

The book that changed my life... it's just brilliant.

I remember where I was when I read each of Maggie Nelson's books in the same way I remember a place where I heard important news. Her words come, as though from a great distance, and strike incredibly close. I did not actually read Bluets, I think - I just let it hit me.

Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation.

[Nelson's] candour, also evident in The Argonauts, gives Bluets a turbo-charged vitality, precision and authenticity that frees her to reflect on the way female desire is too often sidelined or ignored.... In her dark excavation of grief, she has collected messages of great wisdom and powerful beauty.

Nelson… looks sideways at her heartbreak, allowing for moments of piercing clarity as feelings come into focus. There is wisdom and beauty in this short work.

A luminous meditation on the author’s love for a single colour that displaces itself onto the grief prompted by the end of a relationship and the serious injury of a friend.

Arty, smart and gorgeous meditation on the color blue.

Bluets is a slim but intense volume dedicated to the colour blue, and to feeling blue. Nelson takes a Wittgensteinian form and fills it with feeling. In 240 loosely linked fragments she moves between memoir and analysis, from spiritual inquiry to erotic obsession… Beautiful.

A real short-sharp punch in the heart. Truly sad and beautiful, it’s a raw meditation on falling passionately in love with a colour.

What could be more invented than a life story that reads like a novel? Bluets doesn’t invent that way: its inventions are wilder, wiser (and more true) than that… each proposition is breathtaking.

A syncopated arrangement of 240 prose poems collected across three years of slowly dwindling grief and heartbreak, it centres around the colour blue and how it helped to heal Nelson’s pain.

This discussion of the colour blue is a gorgeous read, almost religious in the way it defaults to the beautiful and the sublime.

When I want a sprawling, consuming book about love and loss, I turn to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. The compact hybrid book of literature, memoir, and poetry at only 99 pages in length lingers long after the cover is turned over.

I can’t stop thinking about [Bluets].

Always beguiling, her writing is powerful, incisive and so singular that it defies categorization … raw, honest and urgent… [Nelson] always prompt me to see some aspect of life very differently.

Last year, while recovering from a break up with a long-term partner, I carried the book with me everywhere... The way that she renders her experiences and thoughts in such vivid, aching and raw detail served as a shelter for me, and a way to articulate feelings I didn't yet have the distance or strength to put words to.

Bluets is an expansive, intensely poetic text about Nelson's life-long infatuation with the colour blue... in Nelson's most visceral moments of divulgence, we see a testament to love in all its inexpressibility.

Essays and Conversations

Like Love

Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide - from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker - but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression and perversity; the roles of the critic and language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making. 
 
Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.

Maggie Nelson's shimmering genius is on full display in this collection. Like Love not only spans the breadth of her generous and supple thinking but also highlights the steadfast consistency of her principles, which seek to elucidate the aesthetic, moral and political conditions that could expand our notion of human coexistence. I'm grateful for her theories that always bring light to the murk, that hold and think through opposing arguments to find the meridian points between. Like Love is a celebration of friendship and outlaw communities of artists and writers that demonstrates how we can hold onto love as we hurtle uncertainly into the future

Like Love is a convergence of the most incandescent parts of Maggie Nelson&rsquo;s inimitable craft: there is her ceaseless curiosity, her capacity not only to hold complexity but to court it with equal parts desire and critique, the generosity and gratitude of her thinking held by gorgeous turns of phrase. I have always wanted to be brought along with her, to participate in the conversation, to hang out, to get ruminative and lucubratory, to spend time with the cool people she's spending time with, to get lost, to get found, then to get lost again. Like Love is that invitation

Maggie Nelson&rsquo;s shimmering genius is on full display in this collection. Like Love not only spans the breadth of her generous and supple thinking but also highlights the steadfast consistency of her principles, which seek to elucidate the aesthetic, moral and political conditions that could expand our notion of human coexistence. I'm grateful for her theories that always bring light to the murk, that hold and think through opposing arguments to find the meridian points between. Like Love is a celebration of friendship and outlaw communities of artists and writers that demonstrates how we can hold onto love as we hurtle uncertainly into the future.

Maggie Nelson

The electrifying new book from the author of The Argonauts

What can freedom really mean? 
 
'One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation' OLIVIA LAING 
 
In this invigorating, essential book, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about freedom. Drawing on pop culture, theory and real life, she follows freedom - with all its complexities - through four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. On Freedom offers a bold new perspective on the challenging times in which we live. 
 
'Tremendously energising' Guardian 
 
'This provocative meditation...shows Nelson at her most original and brilliant' New York Times 
 
'Nelson is such a friend to her reader, such brilliant company... Exhilarating' Literary Review 
 
* A New York Times Notable Book *

Maggie Nelson

On Freedom

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