“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 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. “Maggie Nelson has proven her brilliance-a special blend of poeticism and philosophy, of theorizing and prose-weaving-in her eight previous nonfiction releases. She cozies up to ideas unlike any other American writer.” - The Boston Globe Because of her dazzling sentences, I will read whatever the daredevil writes.

“Reading Maggie Nelson is like watching a high-wire act.

“Maggie Nelson slays entrenched notions of gender, marriage, and sexuality with lyricism, intellectual brass, and soul-ringing honesty in The Argonauts.” - Vanity Fair 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 “ book-part memoir, part critical inquiry touching on desire, love, and family-is a superb exploration of the risk and the excitement of change. 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 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. My first reaction to Nelson’s book was awestruck silence, such as one might experience when confronted with some dazzling supernatural phenomenon. “Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts exists in its own universe.

“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

*Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism*

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