The Library at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center invites the community to participate in the February 2018 Community Book Discussion featuring The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. The Community Book Discussion is an intergenerational discussion facilitated by Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University

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, offers a firsthand account 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.

Reviews of The Argonauts:

“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] 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

Community Book Discussions at The Library at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center are made possible thanks to sponsorship from Lehigh University's Humanities Center, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Pride Center, and Mellon Digital Humanities Initiative

The first ten people to sign up can email [email protected] to receive a free copy of the book