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Jane: A Murder Paperback – September 13, 2016
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Jane 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.
Exploring 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 The Michigan Murders and Killer Among Us, 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.
Each piece in Jane 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, Jane’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.
- Print length200 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSoft Skull
- Publication dateSeptember 13, 2016
- Dimensions5 x 0.6 x 7.63 inches
- ISBN-101593766580
- ISBN-13978-1593766580
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Product details
- Publisher : Soft Skull; Reissue edition (September 13, 2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 200 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1593766580
- ISBN-13 : 978-1593766580
- Item Weight : 6.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5 x 0.6 x 7.63 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #85,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #40 in Family Poetry (Books)
- #66 in Death, Grief & Loss Poetry (Books)
- #69 in Comedic Dramas & Plays
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Maggie Nelson is the author of several acclaimed books in multiple genres. Her books of nonfiction include Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Graywolf Press, 2024), On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press, 2021), The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), global best-seller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; a landmark work of cultural, art, and literary criticism titled The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011), which was named a NY Times Notable Book of the Year; the cult classic Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), which was named by Bookforum one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years; a memoir about her family, media spectacle, and sexual violence titled The Red Parts (originally published by Free Press in 2007, reissued by Graywolf in 2016); and a critical study of painting and poetry titled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa, 2007; winner, the Susanne M. Glassock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship). Her books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007), Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), The Latest Winter (Hanging Loose Press, 2003), and Shiner (Hanging Loose, 2001). She has been the recipient of a Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and an Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant. In 2016 she received a MacArthur "genius" grant. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California.
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Maggie was about to release a poetic, journal, type memoir of the Aunt she never knew and go on a book tour when the old Sheriff called and said they found the killer and the trial would be next week !
Once more the family would have to go through the horrors of a brutal murder trial . Maggie Nelson does an excellent job writing about the feelings that go through her mind and she tries very hard to place you right in the middle of the conflicting family relationships that such stress asituation I could never imagine could happen . She writes clearly , precisely and sometimes bluntly about all of the details in the case which is definitely a difficult situation with which to pressure yourself to write so objectively as it seems Maggie Nelson holds it together. This was the first book about the details of her own research into the murder . She did go on to publish a memoir from some journals , poems and added poetry and comments about the way Maggie and her family felt throughout the whole ordeal. Maggie is also well known for writing Jason and the Argonauts!
I literally cried in certain places and devoured the book in less than 24 hours. I was unable to walk away from Jane. I wanted to know more. But tragically there is no more, and it makes what thoughts of hers that we do have all the more precious.
One of the ten best books I've ever read.
Really an amazing way to explore such a personal yet painfully public event.
Definitely recommend to anyone interested in: poetry, true crime, psychology.
And maybe this is my own weird thing, and I know I’m about to compare it to a fiction story, but this really made me think of The Diary of Laura Palmer. I read it earlier in 2017 and it also had a sad, poetic, deeply human core that I identified with. Anyway. Read this one! It will take you max three hours!
Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2018
Really an amazing way to explore such a personal yet painfully public event.
Definitely recommend to anyone interested in: poetry, true crime, psychology.
And maybe this is my own weird thing, and I know I’m about to compare it to a fiction story, but this really made me think of The Diary of Laura Palmer. I read it earlier in 2017 and it also had a sad, poetic, deeply human core that I identified with. Anyway. Read this one! It will take you max three hours!
Top reviews from other countries
The only positive thing: A short read.
Otherwise a mixture of newspaper scraps etc. and thoughts floating through the author's mind. Likely being conceived while being tired on a train and hovering between being hardly awake and (day) dreaming?
Only recommendable for lovers of this genre / style. Otherwise: A severe case of waste of time and money.
Jane’s murder was the third in a series of seven. The killer was apprehended and sent to prison. The book shreds some doubt on whether the right killer was charged for Jane’s murder. This causes an unsatisfactory ending to the book as the real killer is not produced.
In the epistle Nelson writes that writing this book ‘is therapy for me.’ Signifying that the murder of her aunt, although occurring years before she was born had a monumental effect on her life. She begins the book under the section title The light of the mind (four dreams). This implies that the following prose were dreams of Nelsons.
The next section titled Figment - Nelson analyses the history of the word and the exact meaning of figment. Her grandfather had asked a reasonable question in response to Nelson telling him she's going to write a book about Jane (his daughter). “What will it be a figment of your imagination?” Nelson(2005,p.23) As a writer/reader I didn’t understand Nelsons viewpoint on the conversation as her Grandfather’s question seemed perfectly logical to me.
The collection of material is like looking through someones scrapbook. It’s interesting, maybe slightly haunting but a reader could feel robbed of their hard earned money. It seems more of a flick through than a sit down and read as the pages are sparse. Disappointingly the (scrap) book doesn't provide a cliff hanger or a provide any new information on the murder.