The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
8 Rating(s)
List: $13.95 | Sale: $9.77
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The Argonauts

Author: Maggie Nelson

Narrator: Maggie Nelson

Unabridged: 4 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/04/2015

Synopsis

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and familyMaggie 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.

About Maggie Nelson

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

Goodreads review by karen on June 15, 2022

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH! this is the opening paragraph of the book: October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark off the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuck......more

Goodreads review by emma on December 05, 2022

just lovely. i love memoirs because they are as close as you can get to the readability of fiction while being true, and because people are cool and i like them, and because i'm addicted to stories, but above all because i'm nosy. this satisfied all of those reasons. this is more academic than it is po......more

Goodreads review by Lisa of Troy on January 08, 2025

While The Argonauts is classified as feminist literature, I felt like I was falling off a mountain covered in vegetation, struggling to find purchase, grasping wildly at the brush, and ultimately coming up short. The Argonauts is told in a stream of consciousness manner without any chapters, detailin......more

Goodreads review by aPriL does feral sometimes on March 10, 2021

Um. 'The Argonauts' is about gender, pregnancy, and other things. The name 'Argonaut' is borrowed from a book passage in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. It refers to a boat, and the answer is if you replace every particle of the boat, it is still the same boat called Argonaut, and how that compare......more

Goodreads review by Lark on January 30, 2019

this book cracked me open like a walnut. One of those messy walnuts where the nut ends up shattered to pieces in your hand. While reading I was frequently on a vertiginous edge close to weeping, not really from any feeling with a name, just from all the feeling that was going on as I read. Part of i......more

Quotes

“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.” New York Times

“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

“So much writing about motherhood makes the world seem smaller after the child arrives…Nelson’s book does the opposite.” New York Times Book Review

“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

“Reading Maggie Nelson is like watching a high-wire act. Her books are inspiring.” Boston Globe

“Nelson’s writing is fluid…She masterfully analyzes the way we talk about sex and gender.” Huffington Post

“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.” Vulture

“Exploring questions of family, mortality, and gender, and finding inspiration in both the personal and the artistic along the way.” Vol1 Brooklyn

“One of the most intelligent, generous, and moving books of the year.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Awards

  • Publishers Weekly Best Book
  • Goodreads Readers’ Choice
  • New York Times Book Review Notable Book
  • Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books
  • NPR’s Great Reads
  • A Flavorwire Pick
  • New Yorker Best Book
  • BuzzFeed Books Pick
  • Portland Mercury Pick
  • National Book Critics Circle Award
  • Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick
  • Bust Magazine Pick
  • Folio Prize Nominee
  • Audible Editors Top Pick
  • Guardian Pick
  • Literary Hub Pick
  • Paste Magazine Pick
  • Esquire Pick
  • Autostraddle Pick
  • Wired Magazine Pick
  • Vulture.com Pick
  • Vol.1 Brooklyn Pick
  • New York Public Library Staff Pick
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