Maggie Nelson

• Biography

  Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and award-winning author of The Argonauts, Bluets, The Art of Cruelty, Jane: A Murder , and The Red Parts, among others.

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• Praise for Books

  “An elegant, indispensable addition to the genre of the lyric essay.” —Boston Review

  “A superb exploration of the risk and the excitement of change…[a] collaboration between Nelson’s mind and heart.” —New Yorker

  “A harrowing but clear-eyed examination of crime’s emotional fallout.” —Guardian (London)

  “In this gender-bending memoir, Maggie Nelson writes about the way both their bodies were changing, and about the intricacies of building her queer family.” —New York Times

  “Nelson relates a history of blue from philosophical, zoological, and literary perspectives, all the while weaving in bits of memoir and emotional rumination. Through this collage, she broadens the definition of blue from a merely visual phenomenon to a vehicle for the divine.” — Time Out New York

  “In this gender-bending memoir, Maggie Nelson writes about the way both their bodies were changing, and about the intricacies of building her queer family.” —New York Times

  “Nelson’s resistance to the easy answer, her willingness to reach a kind of conclusion and then to break it, to probe further and further, to ask about her own complex and not entirely noble intentions instead of facilely condemning others, make The Red Parts an uneasy masterpiece.” —NPR

  “A superb exploration of the risk and the excitement of change…An exceptional portrait both of a romantic partnership and of the collaboration between Nelson’s mind and heart.” —New Yorker

  “A book to be experienced. I can only report that I am reading it again and again, that the resonances between the (seemingly) disparate propositions are startling and emotional, that I suspect your reaction will be different and also quite wonderful.” —The Rumpus

  “What a dazzlingly generous, gloriously unpredictable book! Maggie Nelson shows us what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as challenging as it is liberating. She invites us to ‘pay homage to the transitive’ and enjoy ‘a becoming in which one never becomes.’ Reading The Argonauts made me happier and freer.” —Eula Biss, author of Notes from Nowhere

  “Rarely does a book come along that combines such extraordinary lyricism and ethical precision with the sense that the author is writing for her very life.” —Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

  “One of the most intelligent, generous, and moving books of the year.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Bluets is smart yet intimate, quiet yet provocative, and a welcome addition to the poetic nonfiction discourse.” —Bomb

  “Once again, Maggie Nelson has created awe-inspiring work, one that smartly calls bullshit on the places culture—radical subcultures included—stigmatize and misunderstand both maternity and queer family-making. With a fiercely vulnerable intelligence, Nelson leaves no area un-investigated, including her own heart. I know of no other book like this, and I know how crucially the culture needs it.” —Michelle Tea, author of Valencia

  “A book-long riff on the first-person essay that Joan Didion built. A genre-buster…Nelson intertwines psychoanalysis, personal memoir, and true-crime tidbits into a darkly intelligent page-turner.” —Time Out

  “A book that will challenge readers as much as the author has challenged herself.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “May radically redefine poetry, as it increasingly becomes the genre that is not one.” —Bookforum

  “Slays entrenched notions of gender, marriage, and sexuality with lyricism, intellectual brass, and soul-ringing honesty.” —Vanity Fair

  “Nelson’s book is more a reflection on our personal and cultural myth making surrounding murders than an exploration into this particular killer and what he did. This take is refreshing, and combined with Nelson’s intense, visual, and sometimes darkly funny prose, it makes The Red Parts an unforgettable book.” —BookPage

  “[An] incredibly rich autobiographical meditation…Nelson blends philosophical inquiry, memoir, and gender criticism in a form she has dubbed ‘autotheory.’ Like her writing, Nelson’s theory blurs, eradicates, even breaks the margins of binary thinking and of the prevailing normative notion that we should each live a life that is ‘all one thing.’” —Library Journal

  “A beautiful, passionate and shatteringly intelligent meditation on what it means not to accept binaries but to improvise an individual life that says, without fear, ‘yes, and.’” —Chicago Tribune

  “Blending a poet’s passion and a journalist’s cool eye, Nelson has produced a distinctive story of an otherwise ordinary family’s encounter with unspeakable violence.” —Shelf Awareness

  “So much writing about motherhood makes the world seem smaller after the child arrives…Nelson’s book does the opposite.” —New York Times Book Review

  “A loose yet intricate tapestry of memoir, art criticism, and gently polemic.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Free from the bounds of genre, but not untethered as in floating—not wispy or in flight. As a text, The Red Parts bears weight, though it moves nimbly; it is expansive, shifting, and sprawling, eddying into small moments of memory and time before flooding outward, straining against the limits of the writer and the writer’s mind.” —Literary Hub

  “Slays entrenched notions of gender, marriage, and sexuality with lyricism, intellectual brass, and soul-ringing honesty.” —Vanity Fair

  “An honest, joyous affirmation of one happily unconventional family finding itself.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A magnificent achievement of thought, care, and art.” —Los Angeles Times

  “A fiercely provocative and intellectually audacious memoir that focuses on motherhood, love, and gender fluidity.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Reading Maggie Nelson is like watching a high-wire act. Her books are inspiring.” —Boston Globe

  “[An] incredibly rich autobiographical meditation…Nelson blends philosophical inquiry, memoir, and gender criticism.” —Library Journal

  “Nelson’s writing is fluid…She masterfully analyzes the way we talk about sex and gender.” —Huffington Post

  “Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture’s prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.” —Ben Lerner, award-winning author of Leaving the Atocha Station

  “Part portrait of a happy family, part critical meditation on queerness…It doesn’t hurt that she speaks with the voice of a poet either.” —Vulture

  “Exploring questions of family, mortality, and gender, and finding inspiration in both the personal and the artistic along the way.” —Vol1 Brooklyn

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• 

  • Bluets

  • By Maggie Nelson

    Read by Maggie Nelson

  • Release Date: 10/29/19

  • Formats: Digital Audy

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

  Since 2009, when it first published, to today, Bluets has drawn scores of readers with its surprising insights into the emotional depths that make us most human—via 240 short pieces, at once lyrical and philosophical, on the color blue. This new edition celebrates Maggie Nelson’s uncompromising vision, inviting longtime fans and newcomers alike to experience and share in an indispensable work that continues to disrupt the literary landscape.

  • Bluets

  • By Maggie Nelson

    Read by Maggie Nelson

  • Release Date: 10/29/19

  • Formats: Digital Audy

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• 

  • The Argonauts

  • By Maggie Nelson

    Read by Maggie Nelson

  • Release Date: 6/01/16

  • Formats: Digital Audy

  A timely and genre-bending memoir that offers fresh and fierce reflections on motherhood, desire, identity and feminism

  At the centre of The Argonauts is the love story between Maggie Nelson and the artist Harry Dodge, who is fluidly gendered. As Nelson undergoes the transformations of pregnancy, she explores the challenges and complexities of mothering and queer family making.

  Writing in the tradition of public intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Nelson uses arresting prose even as she questions the limits of language. The Argonauts is an intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of love, language and family.

  • The Argonauts

  • By Maggie Nelson

    Read by Maggie Nelson

  • Release Date: 6/01/16

  • Formats: Digital Audy

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• 

  • The Red Parts

  • By Maggie Nelson

    Read by Cassandra Campbell

  • Release Date: 4/05/16

  • Formats: Digital Audy

  A chilling genre-busting memoir by a major American essayist

  Late in 2004, Maggie Nelson was looking forward to the publication of her book Jane: A Murder, a narrative in verse about the life and death of her aunt, who had been murdered thirty-five years before. The case remained unsolved, but Jane was assumed to have been the victim of an infamous serial killer in Michigan in 1969.

  Then, one November afternoon, Nelson received a call from her mother, who announced that the case had been reopened; a new suspect would be arrested and tried on the basis of a DNA match. Over the months that followed, Nelson found herself attending the trial with her mother and reflecting anew on the aura of dread and fear that hung over her family and childhood—an aura that derived not only from the terrible facts of her aunt’s murder but also from her own complicated journey through sisterhood, daughterhood, and girlhood.

  The Red Parts is a memoir, an account of a trial, and a provocative essay that interrogates the American obsession with violence and missing white women, and that scrupulously explores the nature of grief, justice, and empathy.

  • The Red Parts

  • By Maggie Nelson

    Read by Cassandra Campbell

  • Release Date: 4/05/16

  • Formats: Digital Audy

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• 

  • The Argonauts

  • By Maggie Nelson

    Read by Maggie Nelson

  • Release Date: 8/04/15

  • Formats: Digital Audy

  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, is an intimate portrayal 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.

  • The Argonauts

  • By Maggie Nelson

    Read by Maggie Nelson

  • Release Date: 8/04/15

  • Formats: Digital Audy

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