A fresh new voice in art and cultural criticism takes on the day's most pressing questions about representations of violence in art. Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson 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.

The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

Arts & Photography

Nelson, Maggie

History & Criticism

W.W.Norton&Company

"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.

Shiner

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.

Literature & Fiction

Bloomsbury Academic

Documents how the murder case of the author's aunt was reopened more than three decades later upon the discovery of new DNA findings, describing how the subsequent investigation and trial reopened long-standing wounds for the author and her family. By the author of Jane: A Murder. 40,000 first printing.

The Red Parts: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Regional U.S.

Free Press

One day in March 1969, twenty-three- year-old Jane Mixer was on her way home to tell her parents she was getting married. She had arranged for a ride through the campus bulletin board at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she was one of a handful of pioneering women students at the law school. Her body was found the following morning just inside the gates of a small cemetery fourteen miles away, shot twice in the head and strangled. Six other young women were murdered around the same time, and it was assumed they had all been victims of alleged serial killer John Collins, who was convicted of one of these crimes not long after. Jane Mixer's death was long considered to be one of the infamous Michigan Murders, as they had come to be known. But officially, Jane's murder remained unsolved, and Maggie Nelson grew up haunted by the possibility that the killer of her mother's sister was still at large. In an instance of remarkable serendipity, more than three decades later, a 2004 DNA match led to the arrest of a new suspect for Jane's murder at precisely the same time that Nelson was set to publish a book of poetry about her aunt's life and death - a book she had been working on for years, and which assumed her aunt's case to be closed forever. The Red Parts chronicles the uncanny series of events that led to Nelson's interest in her aunt's death, the reopening of the case, the bizarre and brutal trial that ensued, and the effects these events had on the disparate group of people they brought together. But The Red Parts is much more than a "true crime" record of a murder, investigation, and trial. For into this story Nelson has woven a spare, poetic account of a girlhood and early adulthood haunted by loss, mortality, mystery, and betrayal, as well as a subtle but blistering look at the personal and political consequences of our cultural fixation on dead (white) women. The result is a stark, fiercely intell

Red Parts

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and familyMaggie 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."

The Argonauts: Library Edition

Arts & Literature

Blackstone Pub

Late in 2004, Maggie Nelson received a call from her mother, who announced that the case of Maggie's aunt Jane, who had been murdered thirty-five years before 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. 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.

The Red Parts Lib/E: Autobiography of a Trial

True Crime

Blackstone Publishing

The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial

Blackstone Audiobooks

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away?    Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson 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.

Tantor Media, Inc.

Tantor Audio

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nelson, Maggie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Nelson, Maggie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nelson, Maggie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

Shiner

The Red Parts: A Memoir

Red Parts

The Argonauts: Library Edition

The Red Parts Lib/E: Autobiography of a Trial

The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial

The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning