Bluets: AS SEEN ON BBC2’S BETWEEN THE COVERS

**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.

About the Author :
Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of prose and poetry including The Red Parts, Bluets, the National Book Critics Circle Award-winner The Argonauts, On Freedom, Like Love and, most recently, Pathemata. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

Review :
Transcendent.... very inspiring. She’s an amazing writer. Maggie Nelson... She's so much better than anything I've read for a long, long time. The book that changed my life... it's just brilliant. 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. Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation. A gorgeous, eddying read. 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. 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. Arty, smart and gorgeous meditation on the color blue. Bluets is a slim but intense volume dedicated to the colour blue, and to feeling blue. Nelson takes a Wittgensteinian form and fills it with feeling. In 240 loosely linked fragments she moves between memoir and analysis, from spiritual inquiry to erotic obsession… Beautiful.