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Reading lists

Fifteen non-fiction books to inspire you

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Interviews

How Maggie Nelson found freedom

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7 lesser-known Vintage Classics by women

Or, The Story of My Mouth

Pathemata

It’s not the dream that matters, it’s the telling of the dream – the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mind 
 
This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer. 
 
Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator’s tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss – the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life. 
 
With characteristic precision, humour and compassion, Nelson explores the limits of language to describe experience, while also offering a portrait of an unnerving and isolating time in our shared history. A stunning, original experiment in interiority by the adored author of Bluets and The Argonauts, Pathemata is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as an uncanny meditation on love, affliction and resilience.

'Among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation'

‘One of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic’

‘Her words come as though from a great distance and strike incredibly close’

‘Maggie Nelson shows us what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as challenging as it is liberating’

‘Maggie Nelson who writes with such passion, clarity, explicitness, fluidity, playfulness and generosity that she redefines what thinking can do today’

In Pathemata, Nelson somehow manages to write with perfect emotional pitch: its melancholia balanced with humour, its moments of grief and pain tempered by joy. Full of warmth, wisdom and weirdness, it is bound to become a classic. I adored it

Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of prose and poetry including The Red Parts, Bluets, the National Book Critics Circle Award-winner The Argonauts, and On Freedom. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

It’s not the dream that matters, it’s the telling of the dream – the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mind 
 
This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer. 
 
Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator’s tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss – the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life. 
 
With characteristic precision, humour and compassion, Nelson explores the limits of language to describe experience, while also offering a portrait of an unnerving and isolating time in our shared history. A stunning, original experiment in interiority by the adored author of Bluets and The Argonauts, Pathemata is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as an uncanny meditation on love, affliction and resilience.

Four Songs of Care and Constraint

On Freedom

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 *

With insight and intellectual rigour Nelson wrestles the concept of "freedom" away from its contemporary political misuses and explores what it means in the context of art, sex, drugs and climate.

Part of what makes [Nelson's] writing so compelling is a comfort with uncertainty... It is a delight to spend time with Nelson's erudite mind.

Nelson is such a friend to her reader, such brilliant company. Her book is a nuanced, exhilarating rallying cry for all those who are tired of the drab norms of our tech-topia and who long for another conversation

[Nelson's] books vary between an academic or lyrical register, but all revel in the recognition that feeling and thought aren't fixed... They encourage a slowing down, an absorbing... [and a] willingness for intellectual and linguistic exploration.

This account soars in its ability to find nuance in considering questions of enormous importance... Once again, Nelson proves herself a masterful thinker and an unparalleled prose stylist.

Maggie Nelson is an expert at distilling whatever topic she tackles into crystalline prose. She is the queen of the effortless jumping off point, catapulting her readers into the far reaches of Big Questions.

Lit Hub, 'Most Anticipated Books of 2021'

Maggie Nelson needs no genre. Reading her books... tends to make classification of any kind feel destructive, like it would slice through her writing's vital connective tissue... Reading Nelson is like watching a prima ballerina deliver the performance of a lifetime: athletic, graceful, and awe-inspiring.

A top cultural critic plucks the concept of freedom away from right-wing sloganeers and explores its operation in current artistic and political conversations. . . . The subtlety of Nelson's analysis and energy of her prose refresh the mind and spirit.

Profound . . . wide-ranging essays analyzing freedom as it relates to the arts, sexuality, addiction, and, perhaps surprisingly, climate change. . . . A heady mix of erudite analysis and personal revelation. . . . Nelson brings a critically nuanced appreciation of individual and societal freedom to her mapping of the minefields involved in simultaneously embracing liberty and jettisoning habits of control and paranoia that threaten liberation.

On Freedom proves that Nelson continues to do us a great service as a critic, which is to herself digest, and sometimes wrestle with, copious amounts of literature and theory . . . and to integrate this material into a relatively short book, in an accessible, felicitous voice all Nelson's own.

Maggie Nelson's books crack your heart open on a marble countertop and piece it back together, but not before you've thought critically about your entire life. Her writing leaves you smarter, even if it sometimes contains truths that are hard to swallow. Her latest work is an essay collection that meditates on the concept of freedom, drawing on ideas from pop culture and critical theory, which is sure to explore your brain in the best way.

Nelson makes her case persuasively, marshalling a chorus of thinkers alongside her own experience. One model of freedom, On Freedom suggests, lies in choosing - and arguing for - one's definition of freedom itself.

You'll . . . find lots to keep you engaged-provocative ideas, thinkers you've never heard of and a vast encyclopedia of cultural references.

The venerable Maggie Nelson weighs in with the long-awaited follow-up to her masterpiece The Argonauts. On Freedom is a characteristically thoughtful and expansive work of cultural criticism that digs into this fraught topic through the lens of art, sex, drugs, and climate.

Nelson is so outrageously gifted a writer and thinker.

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

A writer who plays with prose and remakes the genre.

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.

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.

On Freedom is brave, sprawling, more troublesome than trouble-shooting - and in the spirit of Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble, quoted here by Nelson, that's just as it should be.

Maggie Nelson writes with a luminosity that is, upon opening any one of her books, immediately enlivening.

A patient and astringent analysis of what we owe each other and what we owe ourselves, and how to balance the two demands.

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts, and most recently in the UK, Bluets. She teaches at University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

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, Dark Looks, 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.

Autobiography of a Trial

The Red Parts

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.

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.

AS SEEN ON BBC2’S BETWEEN THE COVERS

Bluets

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

**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.

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.

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.

Maggie Nelson

Like Love may be one of the most movingly specific, the most lovingly unruly celebrations of the ethics of friendship we have

A polyphonic assemblage . . . Graceful and aesthetic, deftly crossing boundaries and definitions, a concordant symphony

Maggie Nelson is one of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic

To read Like Love is to watch [Nelson] circling issues of gender and sexuality, but refracted through a variety of different prisms, so that the end result is a constellation of ideas that seem to be expanding outwards

Nelson’s admiration and enthusiasm for her subjects is a palpable driver of joy and delight . . . A revelatory gathering of beloved art and artists presented with distinctive prose

Maggie Nelson's shimmering genius is on full display in this collection

Drawn from nearly twenty years of genre-defying author Maggie Nelson’s work, Like Love offers incisive commentary on topics ranging from music and literature to feminism and queerness to motherhood and love

We have a sense, I think, of the false border sequestering art from theory. And so to remark on Maggie Nelson’s facility in mating the two is to say the least about how she does so – which is with a hurtling gusto that nonetheless invites us to pause and think

Like Love is a convergence of the most incandescent parts of Maggie Nelson’s inimitable craft

A luminous gathering of dispatches from the delicate adventure of thinking alongside other people. Like Love is a reminder of wow

One of the most wonderful, poetic minds of this generation

A pleasure to read: incisive, smart and witty, it will leave you looking and love and life anew

Essays and Conversations

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 Kara Walker to Bjork – but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression and perversity; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making. 
 
The collection is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development as a writer, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.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.Like Love is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development as a writer, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.

Maggie Nelson

Praise for Like Love

Like Love may be one of the most movingly specific, the most lovingly unruly celebrations of the ethics of friendship we have

A polyphonic assemblage . . . Graceful and aesthetic, deftly crossing boundaries and definitions, a concordant symphony

Maggie Nelson is one of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic

Like Love may be one of the most movingly specific, the most lovingly unruly celebrations of the ethics of friendship we have

A polyphonic assemblage . . . Graceful and aesthetic, deftly crossing boundaries and definitions, a concordant symphony

Maggie Nelson is one of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic

Like Love may be one of the most movingly specific, the most lovingly unruly celebrations of the ethics of friendship we have

A polyphonic assemblage . . . Graceful and aesthetic, deftly crossing boundaries and definitions, a concordant symphony

Maggie Nelson is one of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic

Books by Maggie Nelson

Articles featuring Maggie Nelson

Fifteen non-fiction books to inspire you

How Maggie Nelson found freedom

7 lesser-known Vintage Classics by women

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