Description

A profound and deeply personal exploration of pain, the body and loss by the beloved author of Bluets and The Argonauts

‘Full of warmth, wisdom and weirdness’ JENNY MUSTARD

This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer.

Pathemata recounts the narrator’s tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss – the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life.

Praise for Maggie Nelson

‘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’ ANNE ENRIGHT

‘Always brilliant’ GEOFF DYER

‘Among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation’ OLIVIA LAING

Publisher Review

‘Among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation’ — Olivia Laing ‘One of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic’ — Sinead Gleeson ‘Always brilliant’ — Geoff Dyer ‘Her words come as though from a great distance and strike incredibly close’ — Anne Enright ‘Maggie Nelson shows us what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as challenging as it is liberating’ — Eula Biss ‘Maggie Nelson who writes with such passion, clarity, explicitness, fluidity, playfulness and generosity that she redefines what thinking can do today’ — Wayne Koestenbaum In Pathemata, Nelson somehow manages to write with perfect emotional pitch: its melancholia balanced with humour, its moments of grief and pain tempered by joy. Full of warmth, wisdom and weirdness, it is bound to become a classic. I adored it — Jenny Mustard