Maggie Nelson has established herself as one of our foremost cultural critics in this landmark work about representations of violence in art. An important and frequently surprising book . . . could be read as the foundation for a post-avant-garde aesthetics. ?. . . Nelson, who is also a poet, is such a graceful writer that ?I . . . just sat back and enjoyed the show. Laura Kipnis, New York Times Book Review, front-page review Nelson s] critiques of individual artists are delightfully fierce without being mean spirited. . . . Fascinating and bracingly intelligent. . . . The Art of Cruelty s prose is often gorgeous. Troy Jollimore, Boston Globe A lean-forward experience, and in its most transcendent moments, reading it can feel like having the best conversation of your life. Rachel Syme, NPR Books I hope that critics, and aspiring critics, and those who are interested in the relationship between art and ethics, read The Art of Cruelty]. Susie Linfield, New Republic/The Book"

Ari Marcopoulos is an inveterate maker of zines. This project collects in one volume for the first time a selection of zines by Marcopoulos, many never before released, providing a unique insight and overview into an essential part of this influential artist’s daily practice. Often self-published or created in collaboration with boutique and independent publishers like ROMA, Dashwood Books, and PPP Editions, these informal, DIY-aesthetic creations function as sketchbook, diary, installation space, and a means of processing Marcopoulos’s daily practice of photographing his life, his family, his neighborhood, and the rarified cultural milieu in which he operates. This collection showcases an impressive array of printed zines, exploring each as an artistic object through an engaging layout. Beginning in 2015 and presented chronologically per year, key zines are featured—including some made during the pandemic, when Marcopoulos worked primarily on the screen, making PDF zines—and punctuated by individual images presented full scale. An interview with Hamza Walker underscores the role of zines as an essential part of Marcopoulos’s artistic practice, emphasizing the personal, diaristic element within the work, while an essay from Maggie Nelson meditates on the work’s position within a wider social and cultural context. Ari Marcopoulos: Zines is a must-have for anyone interested in this prolific artist’s personal practice and zine culture.

With a foreword by Maggie Nelson, an introduction from Frieze editor Andrew Durbin and afterword from Edmund White 'Unforgettable, heartbreaking' New York Times 'As much about friendship, intimacy, and betrayal as it is about sickness. ... Brilliant' - Dazed 'The father of autofiction, the master of finding that perfect balance of truth and beauty.' Guardian 'As brutal as it is elegant; shot through with a scalding and necessary rage.' - Neil Bartlett, author, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall 'Written with urgency, clarity ... it is electrifying in its searing honesty' - Colm Toibin 'One of the most beautiful, haunting, and fascinating works in the French autofictional canon. Guibert grapples with his own AIDS diagnosis, and the death of his friend Muzil (Michel Foucault), in a dazzling piece of writing.' - Katherine Angel After being diagnosed with AIDS, Herve Guibert wrote this devastating, darkly humorous and personal novel, chronicling three months in the penultimate year of the narrator's life. In the wake of his friend Muzil's death, he goes from one quack doctor to another, from holidays to test centres, and charts the highs and lows of trying to cheat death. On publication in 1990, the novel scandalized French media, which quickly identified Muzil as Guibert's close friend Michel Foucault. The book became a bestseller, and Guibert a celebrity. The book has since attained a cult following for its tender, fragmented and beautifully written accounts of illness, friendship, sex, art and everyday life. It catapulted Guibert into notoriety and sealed his reputation as a writer of shocking precision and power.

Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson s aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane s murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area between 1967 and 1969. Nelson was born a few years after Jane s death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche. Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, dream-accounts, and documentary sources, including local and national newspapers, related true crime books such as The Michigan Murders and Killer Among Us, and fragments from Jane s own diaries written when she was 13 and 21. Its eight sections cover Jane s childhood and early adulthood, her murder and its investigation, the direct and diffuse effect of her death on Nelson s girlhood and sisterhood, and a trip to Michigan Nelson took with her mother (Jane s sister) to retrace the path of Jane s final hours. Each piece in Jane has its own form, and the movement from each piece to the nextalong with the white space that surrounds each fragmentserve as important fissures, disrupting the tabloid, page-turner quality of the story, and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another s life and death. Part elegy, part memoir, detective story, part meditation on violence (and serial, sexual violence in particular), and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane s powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can dowhat kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them."

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

A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With "Bluets," Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.

Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including "Something Bright, Then Holes" (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and "Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions" (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

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.

Jesse is a twenty-nine-year-old adrift in San Francisco's demi-monde of sexually ambiguous, drug-taking outsiders, desperately trying to sustain a connection with her bisexual boyfriend. She becomes caretaker and confidante to Madame Pig, a grotesque, besotted recluse. Jesse also meets Madison - Pig's daughter or lover or both - who uses others' desires for her own purposes, and who leads Jesse into a world beyond all boundaries. As startling, original and vital as it was when first published, Suicide Blonde is an intensely erotic story of one young woman's sexual and psychological odyssey, and a modern cult classic.

"The Seas took me back to how I felt as a kid, when you're newly falling in love with literature, newly shocked by its capacity to cast a spell..." Maggie Nelson "[It] blew me away because of the beauty of the language . . . I found myself highlighting about 85% of the book for the language. It is so beautifully written" Jodi Picoult Moored in a coastal fishing town so far north that the highways only run south, the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She's often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean eleven years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid. True to myth, she finds herself in hard love with a land-bound man, an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior. The mesmerizing, fevered coming-of-age tale that follows will land her in jail. Her otherworldly escape will become the stuff of legend. With the inventive brilliance and psychological insight that have earned her international acclaim, Samantha Hunt pulls readers into an undertow of impossible love and intoxication, blurring the lines between reality and fairy tale, hope and delusion, sanity and madness.

Before Maggie Nelson's name became synonymous with such genre-defying, binary-slaying writing as The Argonauts and The Art of Cruelty, this collection of poetry introduced readers to a singular voice in the making: exhilarating, fiercely vulnerable, intellectually curious, and one of a kind. These days/the world seems to split up/into those who need to dredge/and those who shrug their shoulders/and say, It's just something/that happened. While Maggie Nelson refers here to a polluted urban waterway, the Gowanus Canal, these words could just as easily describe Nelson's incisive approach to desire, heartbreak, and emotional excavation in Something Bright, Then Holes. Whether writing from the debris-strewn shores of a contaminated canal or from the hospital room of a friend, Nelson charts each emotional landscape she encounters with unparalleled precision and empathy. Since its publication in 2007, the collection has proven itself to be both a record of a singular vision in the making as well as a timeless meditation on love, loss, and perhaps most frightening of all freedom.

**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.

'One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation' OLIVIA LAING What can freedom really mean? In this invigorating, essential book, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about the concept in ways that are responsive to our divided world. Drawing on pop culture, theory and the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, she follows freedom - with all its complexities - through four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. On Freedom offers a bold new perspective on the challenging times in which we live. 'Tremendously energising' Guardian 'This provocative meditation...shows Nelson at her most original and brilliant' New York Times 'Nelson is such a friend to her reader, such brilliant company... Exhilarating' Literary Review * A New York Times Notable Book * * A Guardian and TLS 'Books of 2021' Pick *

Selected as a Book of the Year 2017 in the Guardian 'Maggie Nelson's short, singular books feel pretty light in the hand... But in the head and the heart, they seem unfathomably vast, their cleverness and odd beauty lingering on' Observer In 1969, Jane Mixer, a first-year law student at the University of Michigan, posted a note on a student noticeboard to share a lift back to her hometown of Muskegon for spring break. She never made it: she was brutally murdered, her body found a few miles from campus the following day. The Red Parts is Maggie Nelson's singular account of her aunt Jane's death, and the trial that took place some 35 years afterward. Officially unsolved for decades, the case was reopened in 2004 after a DNA match identified a new suspect, who would soon be arrested and tried. In 2005, Nelson found herself attending the trial, and reflecting with fresh urgency on our relentless obsession with violence, particularly against women. Resurrecting her interior world during the trial - in all its horror, grief, obsession, recklessness, scepticism and downright confusion - Maggie Nelson has produced a work of profound integrity and, in its subtle indeterminacy, deadly moral precision.

A generously illustrated look at the intricate narrative threads of three of the artist's earliest works, and their continued resonance today Celebrated for works blending performance, video, and sculpture, Matthew Barney has created complex narratives that emerge across series since his earliest exhibitions. Matthew Barney: OTTO Trilogy is the first book to trace the progression of three significant early projects-Facility of INCLINE, Facility of DECLINE, and OTTOshaft- and to reveal the narrative system that links them. Titled after former football player Jim Otto, the series explores the training, discipline, and physical limits of the body alongside questions of sexual difference and desire. Featuring an illuminating introduction by Nancy Spector; an essay by Maggie Nelson on the works' exploration of psychology, bodies, image-making, narrative, and abstraction; and a new text by the artist, this generously illustrated volume includes previously unpublished artist's sketches, behind-the-scenes photographs, research material, and video stills. It is the definitive publication on this important series, and offers a key to understanding many of the themes that thread throughout Barney's oeuvre. Distributed for the Gladstone Gallery Exhibition Schedule: Gladstone Gallery, New York (09/08/16-10/22/16)

"The work of the sculptor Rachel Harrison is both the zeitgeist and the least digestible in contemporary art. It may also be the most important, owing to an originality that breaks a prevalent spell in an art world of recycled genres, styles, and ideas."-Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker In her sculptures, room-sized installations, drawings, photographs, and artist's books, Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) delves into themes of celebrity culture, pop psychology, history, and politics. This publication, created in close collaboration with the artist, explores twenty-five years of her practice and is the first comprehensive monograph on Harrison in nearly a decade. Its centerpiece is an in-depth plate section, which doubles as a chronology of Harrison's major works, series, and exhibitions. Objects are illustrated with multiple views and details, and accompanied by short texts. This thorough approach elucidates Harrison's complicated, eclectic oeuvre-in which she integrates found materials with handmade sculptural elements, upends traditions of museum display, and injects quotidian objects with a sense of strangeness. Six accompanying essays cover Harrison's earliest works to her most recent output. The book also includes a handful of photo-collages that the artist created specifically for this project. Published here for the first time, these pieces superimpose found images with reproductions of Harrison's own past work. Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art Exhibition Schedule: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (October 25, 2019-January 12, 2020)

The Penguin Modern Poets are succinct, collectible, lovingly-assembled guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry, from the UK, America and beyond. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the seasoned poetry lover and the curious reader alike to encounter our most exciting new voices. Volume 6, Die Deeper into Life, features the work of Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine, the two American poets who, in hybrid books bridging the divide between poetry, lyric prose, life-writing and theory such as Bluets, The Argonauts, Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, have transformed the literary landscape over the last 15 years, alongside that of Denise Riley, who for decades has been exploring closely related concerns - motherhood; identity and oppression; loss; the language and words that build, or assault, our selves - as one of the best-kept secrets of British poetry, now fittingly recognized by a string of shortlistings and awards. These are writers who combine deep thought with deep feeling to illuminate our world, how we suffer in it, how we resist it, and how we can live with and love it.

'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.