Skip to main navigation Skip to main content

Graywolf Press is proud to announce a series of events throughout 2024 celebrating fifty years of adventurous publishing, featuring debut and longstanding authors and taking place in New York City, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Chicago, and Tucson. More here

Book Title

The Argonauts

Author 1
Maggie Nelson
Body
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 artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, 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 like 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 childrearing. Nelson’s insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
 
“A fiercely provocative and intellectually audacious memoir. . . . The author turns the whole process and concept of motherhood inside out, exploring every possible perspective, blurring the distinctions among the political, philosophical, aesthetic and personal. . . . A book that will challenge readers as much as the author has challenged herself.”—Kirkus (starred review)

Share Title

List Price
$16.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-735-1
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Pages
Pages
160
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
“Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today.”—Olivia Laing, The Guardian

About the Author

Maggie  Nelson
Credit: Sarah St Clair Renard

Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of prose and poetry including The Red Parts, Bluets, the National Book Critics Circle Award–winner The Argonauts, and On Freedom. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

More by author

Praise

  • “So much writing about motherhood makes the world seem smaller after the child arrives, more circumscribed . . . Nelson’s book does the opposite.”The New York Times Book Review
  • The Argonauts is a moving exploration of family and love, but it’s also a meditation on the seductions, contradictions, limitations, and beauties of being normal, as a person and as an artist.”The New Yorker
  • “Nelson’s vibrant, probing and, most of all, outstanding book is also a philosophical look at motherhood, transitioning, partnership, parenting, and family.”—NPR
  • “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 . . . yesand.”Chicago Tribune
Back to Table of Contents