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OverviewMaggie 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. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Maggie NelsonPublisher: Vintage Publishing Imprint: Jonathan Cape Ltd Dimensions: Width: 14.00cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 20.70cm Weight: 0.240kg ISBN: 9781911214526ISBN 10: 1911214527 Pages: 112 Publication Date: 01 June 2017 Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , General , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In stock  We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately. Table of ContentsReviewsIt's been said that a great writer can turn any subject into an engaging book, but most authors still choose inherently dramatic themes, and few approach the static or plotless. But this is precisely what Bluets, Maggie Nelson's arty, smart and gorgeous meditation on the color blue, sets out to do, and it is alarming how much drama she creates from a subject so apparently simple... Wittgenstein, Goethe, Gertrude Stein and Yves Klein are just a few of the writers and artists whose work Nelson uses to uncover the potency of the colour. But their true function in the book is to establish a stage on which the author can dance. -- Catherine Lacey Time Out 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... Nelson is interested in looking and what it means to see the world and how that is or isn't different from what it means to write about it...Perhaps another way of thinking about Bluets is as an instrument: a looking machine whose sensitivity includes the telescopic, the microscopic, and the flash of heat we feel just before we start to cry... Rather than attach herself to an aesthetic of ugliness in an effort to refuse the confines of ... the patriarchal literary establishment, Nelson transcends them: each proposition is breathtaking. -- Jocelyn Parr Brick It's been said that a great writer can turn any subject into an engaging book, but most authors still choose inherently dramatic themes, and few approach the static or plotless. But this is precisely what Bluets, Maggie Nelson's arty, smart and gorgeous meditation on the color blue, sets out to do, and it is alarming how much drama she creates from a subject so apparently simple... Wittgenstein, Goethe, Gertrude Stein and Yves Klein are just a few of the writers and artists whose work Nelson uses to uncover the potency of the colour. But their true function in the book is to establish a stage on which the author can dance. -- Catherine Lacey Time Out 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... Nelson is interested in looking and what it means to see the world and how that is or isn't different from what it means to write about it...Perhaps another way of thinking about Bluets is as an instrument: a looking machine whose sensitivity includes the telescopic, the microscopic, and the flash of heat we feel just before we start to cry... Rather than attach herself to an aesthetic of ugliness in an effort to refuse the confines of ... the patriarchal literary establishment, Nelson transcends them: each proposition is breathtaking. -- Jocelyn Parr Brick 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. -- Dan Richards Big Issue Author InformationMaggie 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. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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