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. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and "family." An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

"This is criticism at its best." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimately 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.

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.

‘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

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.

‘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

In this, her second anthology of poetry, Maggie Nelson experiments with poetic forms long and short as she charts intimate landscapes, including the poet’s enmeshment in a beloved city—New York—before and after the events of 9/11. The poems of The Latest Winter are rich with wit, melancholy, terror, curiosity, and love.