Maggie Nelson – författare

*Vald till en av 2016 års bästa böcker i DN: »Memoarer att bära med sig som en skatt.«*

»Varför kan inte all litteratur tänka? Eller skit samma förresten, för det kan ju den här.« | JENNY HÖGSTRÖM, AFTONBLADET KULTUR, om vad som var bäst under året som gått.

»En rakt igenom sensationell bok. Jag läste den med känslan av att för första gången stöta på en riktigt stor, samtida tänkare.« | MADELAINE LEVY, SVD

»Fantastisk läsning!« | YUKIKO DUKE

Argonauterna upprepar inte de vanliga formerna för kärleks­historier och memoarer. I stället låter författaren sin egen berättelse framträda i dialoger med de etablerade teorierna i ämnen som kärlek, begär, identitet, kön, sexualitet, äktenskap och barnuppfostran, på ett sätt som synliggör gränserna för vad kärlek tillåts vara.  I centrum för berättelsen finns författarens relation till konstnären Harry Dodge, som under bokens gång påbörjar testosteroninjektioner. Vi följer hur berättaren genomgår en graviditet. Likt argonauternas skepp Argo i den grekiska mytologin, som bit för bit byts ut under resans gång men likväl behåller sitt namn och sin identitet, klargör Nelson hur kärleken villkoras av ständig förändring - och hur all förändring villkoras av kärlek. Maggie Nelsons Argonauterna har jämfört med Roland Barthes och Susan Sontags mest banbrytande verk. Kritiker världen över har hyllat den som ett mästerverk.Här i svensk översättning av Karin Lindeqvist.

MAGGIE NELSON [f. 1973] är en amerikansk författare, poet, essäist och forskare, bosatt i Los Angeles. Med Blått [Bluets, 2009] gjorde hon sig ett namn i hemlandet, innan hon slog igenom internationellt med den sedermera flerfaldigt prisbelönta memoarboken Argonauterna [The Argonauts, 2015]. Utöver dessa har Maggie Nelson skrivit tre essäböcker och fyra diktsamlingar. Till vardags undervisar hon i kreativt skrivande på California Institute of the Arts.

»Det är självbiografiskt, men ingen memoarbok. Det är en essä, men ändå alltför löst hållen för att sorteras in i den genren. Det är lyriskt men inte poesi. Argonauterna är helt enkelt 150 sidor genreöverskridande briljans. Vad det gäller såväl tankegods som formuleringskonst.« | HANNA JEDVIK, GP

»Jag läser Maggie Nelson och finner en utväg ur vår tids låsta identitetsdebatt.« | JENNY ACHENBRENNER, SVD

»Nelsons fantastiska essä om kärlek, moderskap och kroppar är en skarp uppgörelse med binäritet och identitetshets som gör läsaren både lycklig och bildad.« | LI ERIKSDOTTER ANDERSSON, SKÅNSKA DAGBLADET, väljer årets bästa böcker.

»Nelson dödar gamla ingrodda föreställningar om kön, äktenskap och sexualitet, med poesi, intellektuell fräckhet och en hjärtklingande ärlighet.« | VANITY FAIR

»Maggie Nelson är en av de hetaste författarna i USA just nu, en av de skarpaste och spänstigaste tänkarna i sin generation. Musikalisk, polyfonisk; fruktbar, generös den här boken bör vara självklar i hyllan hos varje människa som begär något, och särskilt ifall detta begär är lika med frihet.« | The Guardian

»En tankebok, en ekokammare för färgcitat från många århundraden, en bok om knullande, ett långsamt utvecklande av det som hände mellan jaget och duet, en beskrivning av smärtan och hur svår den är att komma över.« | Ellen Mattson, GP»Nelson är på en massa sätt djupt originell. Jag vet nog ingen annan författare som formulerar skarpa, kritiska resonemang så vackert som hon. « | Kristofer Folkhammar, Aftonbladet

»Kritikern Viola Bao har åstadkommit en lysande översättning, där den amerikanska vardagsprosan, det poetiska och det ibland mer akademiska språket lever lyckliga tillsammans. Det återspeglar nog också Maggie Nelsons egenart: klarheten i det drömska.« | Malin Ullgren, DN

Maggie Nelson är en av USA:s just nu mest hyllade författare. Genombrottet i hemlandet kom med Blått [Bluets], en hybrid mellan poesi och essä; en lyrisk, filosofisk och inte minst självutlämnande undersökning av lidelsen och lidandet, av kärlekens och önskningarnas tillkortakommanden allt reflekterat genom färgen blå. Färgens kulturhistoria, dess konnotationer, läror, etymologier, metaforer, betraktas genom den personliga berättelsens prisma, samtidigt som textväven är sprängfull med referenser till klassisk litteratur; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gertrude Stein, Novalis med flera.

Här i svensk översättning av kritikern och litteraturvetaren Viola Bao.

MAGGIE NELSON är en amerikansk författare, poet och forskare, bosatt i Los Angeles. Förutom Bluets har hon skrivit den prisbelönta Argonauterna [The Argonauts, 2015]; utgiven på Modernista i Karin Lindeqvists översättning, samt böcker som Red Parts: A Memoir och The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning. Förutom att vara författare undervisar Nelson på CalArts (California Institute of the Arts).»Kritikern Viola Bao har åstadkommit en lysande översättning, där den amerikanska vardagsprosan, det poetiska och det ibland mer akademiska språket lever lyckliga tillsammans. Det återspeglar nog också Maggie Nelsons egenart: klarheten i det drömska.« | Malin Ullgren, DN»De roliga iakttagelserna, de skarpa slutsatserna, de glimrande ingivelserna det är vad som förblir mitt slutgiltiga intryck. För efter nästan varje text kan du stanna upp och tänka: Det var som fan!"« | Björn Kohlström, Bernur

»Maggie Nelson kan vara en av de mest sinnesvidgande författare samtidslitteraturen har att erbjuda.« | Therese Eriksson, Västerbottens-Kuriren

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.

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.

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.

Brought to you by Penguin. A GUARDIAN ''BOOKS OF 2021'' PICKSo 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, 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 relation 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.''One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation'' - Olivia Laing© Maggie Nelson 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Brought to you by Penguin.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.©2024 Maggie Nelson (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Brought to you by Penguin.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 mindThis 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.© Maggie Nelson 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

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.

Named a Most Anticipated/Best Book of the Month by: NPR * USA Today * Time * Washington Post * Vulture * Women’s Wear Daily * Bustle * LitHub * The Millions * Vogue * Nylon * Shondaland * Chicago Review of Books * The Guardian * Los Angeles Times * Kirkus * Publishers WeeklySo 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.