Bluets

Nelson, Maggie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911214527 ISBN 13: 9781911214526

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2017

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.

Review:

"Transcendent.... very inspiring. She’s an amazing writer." (Lorde Irish Times)

"Maggie Nelson... She's so much better than anything I've read for a long, long time." (Karl Ove Knausgaard)

"The book that changed my life... it's just brilliant." (Sophie Mackintosh Guardian)

"I remember where I was when I read each of Maggie Nelson's books in the same way I remember a place where I heard important news. Her words come, as though from a great distance, and strike incredibly close. I did not actually read Bluets, I think - I just let it hit me." (Anne Enright)

"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)

"[Nelson's] candour, also evident in The Argonauts, gives Bluets a turbo-charged vitality, precision and authenticity that frees her to reflect on the way female desire is too often sidelined or ignored.... In her dark excavation of grief, she has collected messages of great wisdom and powerful beauty." (Gavin Francis Guardian)

"A gorgeous, eddying read." (Claire-Louise Bennett)

"Nelson... looks sideways at her heartbreak, allowing for moments of piercing clarity as feelings come into focus. There is wisdom and beauty in this short work." (Fiona Wilson The Times)

"A luminous meditation on the author’s love for a single colour that displaces itself onto the grief prompted by the end of a relationship and the serious injury of a friend." (Jenny Hendrix Times Literary Supplement)

"Arty, smart and gorgeous meditation on the color blue." (Time Out)

Book Description:

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

A Guardian Book of the Year