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Maggie Nelson

    January 1, 1973

    Maggie Nelson is an author whose work defies easy categorization, weaving together poetry, prose, and critical theory into a unique literary tapestry. Her writing delves into the complexities of human experience, exploring themes of identity, desire, family, and the nature of art itself. Nelson's distinctive voice emerges from her fearless engagement with both the personal and the intellectual, creating works that are both deeply intimate and profoundly insightful. Readers are drawn to her ability to render the often-elusive aspects of life with striking clarity and intellectual rigor.

    The Red Parts : Autobiography of a Trial
    On Freedom
    The Art of Cruelty
    Jane
    Jane: A Murder
    Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions
    • 2024
    • 2021
      4.0(2190)Add rating

      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. -- Publisher description

      On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
    • 2021

      What can freedom really mean? In this invigorating, essential book, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about the concept in ways that are responsive to our divided world. Drawing on pop culture, theory and the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily 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

      On Freedom
    • 2019

      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.

      Jane
    • 2018

      Published in a beautiful, collectible edition and for the first time in the UK, The Latest Winter is Maggie Nelson's second collection of poetry.

      The Latest Winter
    • 2018

      Something Bright, Then Holes

      • 80 pages
      • 3 hours of reading
      4.0(301)Add rating

      Published in a beautiful, collectible edition and for the first time in the UK, Something Bright, Then Holes is Maggie Nelson's third collection of poetry from Zed Books.

      Something Bright, Then Holes
    • 2018

      In this electrifying and raw debut anthology, Maggie Nelson unpicks the everyday with the quick alchemy and precision of her later modern classics The Argonauts and Bluets. The poems of Shiner experiment with a variety of styles--syllabic verse, sonnets, macaronic translation, Zen poems, walking poems--to express love, bewilderment, grief, and beauty. This book, Nelson's first, heralded the arrival of a fully formed, virtuoso voice.

      Shiner
    • 2017
    • 2016

      Jane: A Murder

      • 200 pages
      • 7 hours of reading
      4.4(299)Add rating

      Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson's aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane's murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area between 1967 and 1969. Nelson was born a few years after Jane's death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche. Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, dream-accounts, and documentary sources, including local and national newspapers, related "true crime" books such as The Michigan Murders and Killer Among Us, and fragments from Jane's own diaries written when she was 13 and 21. Its eight sections cover Jane's childhood and early adulthood, her murder and its investigation, the direct and diffuse effect of her death on Nelson's girlhood and sisterhood, and a trip to Michigan Nelson took with her mother (Jane's sister) to retrace the path of Jane's final hours. Each piece in Jane has its own form, and the movement from each piece to the next--along with the white space that surrounds each fragment--serve as important fissures, disrupting the tabloid, "page-turner" quality of the story, and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another's life and death. Part elegy, part memoir, detective story, part meditation on violence (and serial, sexual violence in particular), and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane's powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can do--what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them

      Jane: A Murder
    • 2016

      The Red Parts : Autobiography of a Trial

      • 224 pages
      • 8 hours of reading
      4.1(817)Add rating

      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 Red Parts : Autobiography of a Trial