Fern Press buys Maggie Nelson's 'original experiment in interiority'

Fern Press has acquired Pathemata by award-winning American author Maggie Nelson. The publisher bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Claire Paterson Conrad on behalf of PJ Mark at Janklow & Nesbit. Pathemata will be published in the UK in May 2025. 

Fern, which launched earlier this year, said: “Pathemata is a dream-like 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 tragi-comic 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." 

The publisher described it as "a stunning new, original experiment in interiority by the adored author of Bluets and The Argonauts". 

Fern Press said: "Pathemata is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as an uncanny meditation on love, affliction and resilience. Maggie Nelson is one of the most original and influential prose writers of our time, and we are very proud to be publishing this beautiful and powerful book." 

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 and, most recently, Like Love (all published by Vintage). She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.