{"product_id":"jane-a-murder-9781593766580","title":"Jane: A Murder","description":"\u003cb\u003ePart elegy, part true crime story, this memoir-in-verse from the author of the award-winning \u003ci\u003eThe Argonauts\u003c\/i\u003e expands the notion of how we tell stories and what form those stories take through the story of a murdered woman and the mystery surrounding her last hours.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eJane\u003c\/i\u003e tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson's aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane's murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area between 1967 and 1969. Nelson was born a few years after Jane's death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eExploring the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, dream-accounts, and documentary sources, including local and national newspapers, related \"true crime\" books such as \u003ci\u003eThe Michigan Murders\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eKiller Among Us\u003c\/i\u003e, and fragments from Jane's own diaries written when she was 13 and 21, its eight sections cover Jane's childhood and early adulthood, her murder and its investigation, the direct and diffuse effect of her death on Nelson's girlhood and sisterhood, and a trip to Michigan Nelson took with her mother (Jane's sister) to retrace the path of Jane's final hours. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eEach piece in \u003ci\u003eJane\u003c\/i\u003e has its own form, and the movement from each piece to the next--along with the white space that surrounds each fragment--serve as important fissures, disrupting the tabloid, \"page-turner\" quality of the story, and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another's life and death. Equal parts a meditation on violence (serial, sexual violence in particular), and a conversation between the living and the dead, \u003ci\u003eJane\u003c\/i\u003e's powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, shows its readers what poetry is capable of--what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMaggie Nelson\u003c\/b\u003e is a poet, critic, scholar, and nonfiction writer. In 2016 she was received a MacArthur \"genius\" grant. She is the author of five books of nonfiction, including \u003ci\u003eThe Argonauts\u003c\/i\u003e (Graywolf Press, 2015), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and was a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestseller; a landmark work of cultural, art, and literary criticism titled \u003ci\u003eThe Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning\u003c\/i\u003e (Norton, 2011), which was featured on the front cover of the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e and named a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e Notable Book of the Year; the cult classic \u003ci\u003eBluets\u003c\/i\u003e (Wave Books, 2009), which was named by \u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e as one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years; a memoir about her family, media spectacle, and sexual violence titled \u003ci\u003eThe Red Parts\u003c\/i\u003e (originally published by Free Press in 2007, reissued by Graywolf in 2016); and a critical study of painting and poetry titled \u003ci\u003eWomen, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions\u003c\/i\u003e (University of Iowa, 2007; winner, the Susanne M. Glassock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship). Her books of poetry include \u003ci\u003eSomething Bright, Then Holes\u003c\/i\u003e (Soft Skull Press, 2007), \u003ci\u003eJane: A Murder\u003c\/i\u003e (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist, the PEN\/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), \u003ci\u003eThe Latest Winter\u003c\/i\u003e (Hanging Loose Press, 2003), and \u003ci\u003eShiner\u003c\/i\u003e (Hanging Loose, 2001). She has been the recipient of a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and an Andy Warhol Foundation\/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant. She lives in Los Angeles.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Soft Skull","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50597510021394,"sku":"9781593766580","price":12.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_55ac1454-e6a3-41c4-829c-57e5d4683d38.jpg?v=1732178603","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/jane-a-murder-9781593766580","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}