Recommendations
Books Like Bluets
Best books to read after Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Bluets uses 240 numbered propositions about the color blue to investigate obsession, heartbreak, and the nature of meaning itself. These 8 books share its hybrid form, lyric intelligence, and preoccupation with the relationship between intellectual inquiry and intimate feeling.
- 1Buy
The Argonauts
by Maggie Nelson
Nelson's 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning autotheory memoir is the natural next read after Bluets — it extends the hybrid form of short, numbered meditations into a book-length work and applies the same method of weaving theory and personal experience to the subject of queer family formation and the body's capacity for change.
- 2Buy
The Empathy Exams
by Leslie Jamison
Jamison's 2014 essay collection is Bluets' closest contemporary companion in its use of the personal essay to do philosophical work — both books refuse to keep the intellectual and the personal in separate compartments, both are preoccupied with pain and its acknowledgment, and both use a hybrid prose style that moves between citation, analysis, and autobiographical disclosure.
- 3Buy
On Being Blue
by William H. Gass
Gass's 1976 philosophical meditation on the color blue is the book that most directly inspired Bluets — a sustained inquiry into blue in language, literature, film, and experience, written in Gass's elaborate, syntactically intricate prose, and the most obvious predecessor to Nelson's project.
- 4Buy
Plainwater
by Anne Carson
Carson's 1995 collection of essay-poems — including translations, a travel narrative, and a sequence of 'interviews' — pioneered the genre-blurring hybrid form that Nelson practices in Bluets, and shares its movement between classical learning and contemporary feeling, between the scholarly and the intimate.
- 5Buy
Autobiography of Red
by Anne Carson
Carson's 1998 novel-in-verse retelling of the myth of Geryon — a monster who falls in love with Herakles and whose story Carson reads as an account of the artist's vulnerability — is the most celebrated work in the hybrid poetry-fiction-myth tradition that Bluets also inhabits, and a masterpiece of lyric intelligence applied to the subject of desire and its grief.
- 6Buy
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
by Max Porter
Porter's 2015 novella — about a widower and his two sons visited by Crow (a figure derived from Ted Hughes's Crow) — is as formally inventive as Bluets, as concerned with grief and the forms it takes, and as invested in the idea that literary tradition can be a medium through which contemporary feeling is processed and transformed.
- 7Buy
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
by Rebecca Solnit
Solnit's 2005 essay collection uses the color blue — particularly the blue of distance in landscape painting — as a frame for meditations on loss, longing, and the strangeness of memory, making it the most direct thematic parallel to Bluets in the essay tradition; Nelson has cited Solnit as an influence.
- 8Buy
The Lover
by Marguerite Duras
Duras's 1984 autofiction about a teenage French girl's affair with a wealthy Chinese man in colonial Vietnam — told in fragments, at angles, circling back — uses the same recursive, meditation-based structure as Bluets to approach desire and its aftermath from the distance that memory imposes, and is the closest formal predecessor in the tradition of lyric personal prose.
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