Pathemata

byMaggie Nelson

Or, The Story of My Mouth

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It’s not the dream that matters, it’s the telling of the dream – the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mind

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.

Merging dreams and dailies, 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.

'Among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation'

Olivia Laing

About Maggie Nelson

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.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • ISBN: 9781529951363
  • Length: 80 pages
  • Price: £9.99
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