Poet & Novelist Maggie Nelson Featured at The Guardian

Maggie Nelson's newest novel, The Red Parts, moves onto U.K. bookstore shelves this week. At the Guardian, Rachel Cooke discusses two of Nelson's newest books, The Red Parts and The Argonauts, introducing her to readers in the U.K. "Maggie Nelson’s short, singular books feel pretty light in the hand: into your bag they slip, almost unnoticed between diary and mobile phone. But in the head and the heart, they seem unfathomably vast, their cleverness and odd beauty lingering on." On, from there:

This is certainly the case with The Argonauts, the 2015 memoir that has brought her, somewhat unexpectedly, so many new readers (this theory-strewn account of her life with the fluidly gendered artist Harry Dodge is now one of six titles on the shortlist for the Rathbones Folio prize). But perhaps it is even more true of The Red Parts, an austere, slim volume that is about to be published in this country for the first time. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think I would be able to put it out of my mind.

Written at speed in the autumn of 2005 – her first draft, she thinks, took her only six months – The Red Parts is an account of the trial and conviction of Gary Earl Leiterman for the murder, in 1969, of Nelson’s aunt, Jane Mixer. This was an event that no one in her family had ever expected to attend. For 35 years the case had gone unsolved, though it was widely assumed that Jane, a law student who was soon to be married, had been a victim of the Michigan serial killer John Norman Collins. But for Nelson, the news that a suspect had at last been found wasn’t only deeply shocking; the timing was “uncanny”, for she had been working feverishly on her aunt’s case, albeit from a rather different angle to the police. When her mother, Jane’s sister, called to tell her that a man would shortly be arrested, Jane: A Murder, Nelson’s poetry book about her aunt’s life and death, was only weeks from publication.

Read more at the Guardian.