The Argonauts
A BuzzFeed Books Pick of Favorite Books of the Decade
Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
An Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for May 2016
A Bust Magazine Pick from Carrie Brownstein's Reading List
A 2017 Folio Prize Nominee
An Audible Editors Top Pick of Favorite Audiobooks
A London Guardian Pick of Best Books of the 21st Century
A Literary Hub Pick of the 10 Best Memoirs of the Decade
A Paste Magazine Pick of Best Memoirs of the Decade
An Esquire Pick of Best Books of the Decade
An Autostraddle Pick of Best Queer, Lesbian, Bisexual Books of the Decade
A Wired Magazine Pick of Best Nonfiction of the Decade
A Vulture.com Pick
Vol.1 Brooklyn Pick
A New York Public Library Staff Pick of Favorite Books of the Last 125 Years
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.
Praise