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The Argonauts Mass Market Paperback – 13 April 2016
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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 centre is a romance- the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author'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 for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
- Print length192 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherText Publishing
- Publication date13 April 2016
- Dimensions14.2 x 1.3 x 19.8 cm
- ISBN-101925355608
- ISBN-13978-1925355604
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Product details
- Publisher : Text Publishing (13 April 2016)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 192 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1925355608
- ISBN-13 : 978-1925355604
- Dimensions : 14.2 x 1.3 x 19.8 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 18,069 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 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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I've read lots of queer literature, queer philosophy, and queer theory in the past decade, but this book made me feel more introspective, thoughtful, and curious about gender, femininity, motherhood, and sex than ever before. Nelson's references to feminist and queer theorists make you feel like you're "in" on something if you've read them, or serve as a great contextualizing introduction if you haven't.
I'm absolutely in love with this book. It may be because it was so easy for me to see myself in her writing, but it may also be because she says so many true things that I haven't been able to voice, even to myself.