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The Slicks

On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift
Brief Description
In The Slicks, Maggie Nelson positions culture-dominating pop superstar Taylor Swift and feminist cult icon Sylvia Plath as twin hosts of the female urge toward wanting hard, working hard, and pouring forth – and as twinned targets of patriarchy’s ancient urge to disparage, trivialise and demonise... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$2800
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In The Slicks, Maggie Nelson positions culture-dominating pop superstar Taylor Swift and feminist cult icon Sylvia Plath as twin hosts of the female urge toward wanting hard, working hard, and pouring forth – and as twinned targets of patriarchy’s ancient urge to disparage, trivialise and demonise such prolific, intimate output.

The Slicks is a heady, rallying and unexpected melding of popular culture and literary criticism – an inspired treatise and unexpected celebration of two iconic female poets by one of the most revered and influential critics of her generation.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781911717652

Publisher: Vintage Publishing

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 13 November 2025

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Fern Press

Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 5.0mm

Width: 111.0mm

Height: 161.0mm

Weight: 50g

Pages: 80

About the Author

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.

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    A career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artists. Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is...
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    The genre-defying, thought-stirring memoir about America's obsession with violence, from the critically acclaimed author of The Argonauts. Selected as a Book of the Year 2017 in the Guardian. Maggie Nelson's short, singular books feel pretty light in the hand... But in the head and the heart, they seem unfathomably vast, their cleverness and odd beauty lingering on — Observer In...
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  • Shiner
    In this electrifying and raw debut anthology, Maggie Nelson unpicks the everyday with the quick alchemy and precision of her later modern classics The Argonauts and Bluets. The poems of Shiner experiment with a variety of styles—syllabic verse, sonnets, macaronic translation, Zen poems, walking poems—to express love, bewilderment, grief, and beauty. This book, Nelson’s first, heralded the arrival of a...
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  • Pathemata
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