Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and nonfiction author of books such as 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.
*Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in
Criticism* "It's Nelson's articulation of her many selves--the poet
who writes prose; the memoirist who considers the truth specious;
the essayist whose books amount to a kind of fairy tale, in which
the protagonist goes from darkness to light, and then falls in love
with a singular knight--that makes her readers feel
hopeful."--Hilton Als, The New Yorker
"Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts exists in its own universe.
My first reaction to Nelson's book was awestruck silence, such as
one might experience when confronted with some dazzling
supernatural phenomenon. Nelson is so outrageously gifted a writer
and thinker that The Argonauts seems to operate in some
astral dimension where the rules of normal physics have been
suspended. Her book is an elegant, powerful, deeply discursive
examination of gender, sexuality, queerness, pregnancy and
motherhood, all conveyed in language that is intellectually potent
and poetically expressive."--Michael Lindgren, The Washington
Post "[Nelson's] book-part memoir, part critical inquiry touching
on desire, love, and family-is a superb exploration of the risk and
the excitement of change. Thinking and feeling are, for Nelson,
mutually necessary processes; the result is an exceptional portrait
both of a romantic partnership and of the collaboration between
Nelson's mind and heart."--The New Yorker "Maggie Nelson
slays entrenched notions of gender, marriage, and sexuality with
lyricism, intellectual brass, and soul-ringing honesty in The
Argonauts."--Vanity Fair "Reading Maggie Nelson is like
watching a high-wire act. Her books are inspiring. . . . Because of
her dazzling sentences, I will read whatever the daredevil writes.
She cozies up to ideas unlike any other American
writer."--The Boston Globe "Maggie Nelson has proven her
brilliance-a special blend of poeticism and philosophy, of
theorizing and prose-weaving-in her eight previous nonfiction
releases. But in The Argonauts, the gifted critic and scholar
breaks generic ground with her work of 'auto theory, ' which offers
a glimpse into the writer's mind, body, and home. . . . The
Argonauts is a must-read."--Bustle "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"--The New York Times Book Review
"Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in
America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her
generation."--Olivia Laing, The Guardian "In The Argonauts,
Maggie Nelson turns 'making the personal public' into a romantic,
intellectual wet dream. A gorgeous book, inventive, fearless, and
full of heart."--Kim Gordon
"[Nelson's] is a radicalism that looks like the future of common
sense. . . . A singular book."--Vulture "A loose yet intricate
tapestry of memoir, art criticism and gently polemic. . . . It's a
book about using the writings of smart, even difficult writers to
help us find clarity and precision in our intimate lives, and it's
a book about the no less intimate pleasures of the life of the
mind. . . . The Argonauts is a magnificent achievement of thought,
care and art."--Los Angeles Times "A daring, intelligent,
strange, and beautiful book. . . . [Nelson] has created an
essential thing, a guide to the first years of the queer 21st
Century, and a hymn to love in all its forms."--The Gay &
Lesbian Review "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
"Nelson's vibrant, probing and, most of all, outstanding book is
also a philosophical look at motherhood, transitioning,
partnership, parenting, and family-an examination of the
restrictive way we've approached these terms in the past and the
ongoing struggle to arrive at more inclusive and expansive
definitions for them."--NPR
"Brilliant like nothing else you've ever read, Maggie Nelson's The
Argonauts is as hard to pin down as it is stunning. In sharp,
intense bursts of language, Nelson melds critical theory with her
most personal musings, as she navigates falling in lust and love,
explores gender, sexuality, and motherhood, and builds a family
with artist Harry Dodge. Although slim, The Argonauts contains
worlds of thought and feeling, challenging our assumptions and
moving our hearts. This book is the first must-read of the
summer."--BuzzFeed "In a culture still too quick to ask
people to pick a side-to be male or female, to be an
assimilationist or a revolutionary, to be totally straight or
totally gay, totally hetero- or totally homo-normative-Nelson's
book is a beautiful, passionate and shatteringly intelligent
meditation on what it means not to accept binaries but to improvise
an individual life that says, without fear, yes,
and."--Chicago Tribune "Reading Nelson is like sweeping the
leaves out of your mental driveway: by the end of one of her books,
you have a better understanding of how the world works...The result
is one of the most intelligent, generous, and moving books of the
year."--Publishers Weekly, Best Summer Books
2015
"The Argonauts finds Nelson at her most vulnerable, arguing for a
radical rethinking of the terms in which we express
love."--The Paris Review, Staff Picks "What a dazzlingly
generous, gloriously unpredictable book! Maggie Nelson shows us
what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as
challenging as it is liberating. She invites us to 'pay homage to
the transitive' and enjoy 'a becoming in which one never becomes.'
Reading The Argonauts made me happier and freer."--Eula Biss
"Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures
of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is
ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy,
no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog."--Ben
Lerner
"There isn't another critic alive like Maggie Nelson-who writes
with such passion, clarity, explicitness, fluidity, playfulness,
and generosity that she redefines what thinking can do
today."--Wayne Koestenbaum "Once again, Maggie Nelson has
created awe-inspiring work, one that smartly calls bullshit on the
places culture--radical subcultures included--stigmatize and
misunderstand both maternity and queer family-making. With a
fiercely vulnerable intelligence, Nelson leaves no area
un-investigated, including her own heart. I know of no other book
like this, and I know how crucially the culture needs
it."--Michelle Tea "One of the greatest books I've ever
read."--Annie Sprinkle "Reading Maggie Nelson's The
Argonauts helped me to feel some things I've long thought about but
hardly been able to express regarding the socialization of the
maternal function, which is the dispersed, dispersive essence of
the futurity we present to one another until one is not another
anymore. There's the violence I commit in making a claim for that
futurity, and the violence I endure when that claim is granted.
There's the exhaustive sharing that takes form as writing. There's
the 'orgy of specificity' when the inexpressible is held and
released in each expression 'cause I just want to sing your name
even when I don't want to sing your name. There's the love story
buried in every 'I love you, ' and in every 'I love you' there's a
contract for destruction and rebuilding. There's The Argonauts,
which is one of the greatest books I've ever read."--Fred
Moten "In the 17th century a book like Maggie Nelson's The
Argonauts might have been called an anatomy, by which I mean it's a
learned, quirky, open-hearted, often beautiful naming-of-parts. The
anatomy never forgets the fragile embodied world-its carnality or
its finitude. And such is The Argonauts: a memoir (debriefing,
really) at once raw, pensive, exhilarating, sad, funny, and
embodied in the same profound way."--Terry
Castle
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