Welcome to our first faculty-picked book of the month!
For our first book, I asked Dr. Aaron Chandler for his recommendation for a title. His pick is Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. Nelson’s book is an autobiographical LGBT+ memoir about “desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language” and the “complexities and joys of (queer) family-making” (Goodreads).
Dr. Chandler describes it as a “slender, poetic book blending memoir and cultural theory with transfixing results”. The book has been critically acclaimed and won awards such as the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (2015), the Folio Prize Nominee (2017), the Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Memoir and Autobiography (2015), and the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature Nominee (2016). Nelson ties her personal experiences to the theories intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, blending critical theory with personal experience as it applies to sexuality, gender, and the “vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing” (Goodreads).
Check out The Argonauts Goodread’s profile here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22929741-the-argonauts?ac=1&from_search=true