The Argonauts

Author(s): Maggie Nelson

Biography

An 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.


Product Information

Winner of National Book Critics Circle Awards: Criticism 2015.

'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.' --New Yorker

'Maggie Nelson slays entrenched notions of gender, marriage and sexuality with lyricism, intellectual brass and soul-ringing honesty.' --Vanity Fair

'A magnificent achievement of thought, care and art.' --Los Angeles Times

'Nelson's writing is fluid-to read her story is to drift dreamily among her thoughts...She masterfully analyzes the way we talk about sex and gender.' --Huffington Post

'One of the most intelligent, generous and moving books of the year.' --STARRED review Publishers Weekly

'A book that will challenge readers as much as the author has challenged herself.' --STARRED review Kirkus Reviews

'So much writing about motherhood makes the world seem smaller after the child arrives, more circumscribed, as if in tacit fealty to the larger cultural assumptions about moms and domesticity; Nelson's book does the opposite.' --New York Times Book Review

Maggie Nelson is a poet, a critic, and the author of several nonfiction books, including The Red Parts, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Bluets, and Jane: A Murder. She teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles, California.

General Fields

  • : 9781925355604
  • : Text Publishing Company
  • : Text Publishing Company
  • : 0.15
  • : October 2015
  • : 198mm X 128mm
  • : Australia
  • : April 2016
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Maggie Nelson
  • : Paperback
  • : 616
  • : English
  • : 811/.54 B
  • : 192
  • : BM