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Sign up todayThe Argonauts
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Learn moreAn intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family
Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of “autotheory” offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.
Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson’s insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and award-winning author of The Argonauts, Bluets, The Art of Cruelty, Jane: A Murder , and The Red Parts, among others.
Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and award-winning author of The Argonauts, Bluets, The Art of Cruelty, Jane: A Murder , and The Red Parts, among others.
Reviews
“In this gender-bending memoir, Maggie Nelson writes about the way both their bodies were changing, and about the intricacies of building her queer family.”
“A superb exploration of the risk and the excitement of change…An exceptional portrait both of a romantic partnership and of the collaboration between Nelson’s mind and heart.”
“So much writing about motherhood makes the world seem smaller after the child arrives…Nelson’s book does the opposite.”
“Slays entrenched notions of gender, marriage, and sexuality with lyricism, intellectual brass, and soul-ringing honesty.”
“A magnificent achievement of thought, care, and art.”
“Reading Maggie Nelson is like watching a high-wire act. Her books are inspiring.”
“Nelson’s writing is fluid…She masterfully analyzes the way we talk about sex and gender.”
“Part portrait of a happy family, part critical meditation on queerness…It doesn’t hurt that she speaks with the voice of a poet either.”
“Exploring questions of family, mortality, and gender, and finding inspiration in both the personal and the artistic along the way.”
“One of the most intelligent, generous, and moving books of the year.”
“A book that will challenge readers as much as the author has challenged herself.”
“[An] incredibly rich autobiographical meditation…Nelson blends philosophical inquiry, memoir, and gender criticism in a form she has dubbed ‘autotheory.’ Like her writing, Nelson’s theory blurs, eradicates, even breaks the margins of binary thinking and of the prevailing normative notion that we should each live a life that is ‘all one thing.’”
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