Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
The Argonauts cover art

The Argonauts

By: Maggie Nelson
Narrated by: Maggie Nelson
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £11.99

Buy Now for £11.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

To Show and to Tell cover art
The Art of Cruelty cover art
Me and the Orgone cover art
I Felt the End Before It Came cover art
You Don't Look Adopted cover art
Imperfectly Sane cover art
Growing Up Queer in Australia cover art
Hard to Love cover art
Confessions of the Other Mother cover art
Modern Nature cover art
It Came from the Closet cover art
My Struggle, Book 1 cover art
Girlhood cover art
What My Mother and I Don't Talk About cover art
Schopenhauer's Porcupines cover art
You Got Anything Stronger? cover art

Summary

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family.

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 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, is an intimate portrayal 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.

©2015 Maggie Nelson (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

More from the same

What listeners say about The Argonauts

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    107
  • 4 Stars
    27
  • 3 Stars
    11
  • 2 Stars
    4
  • 1 Stars
    2
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    84
  • 4 Stars
    22
  • 3 Stars
    8
  • 2 Stars
    8
  • 1 Stars
    4
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    82
  • 4 Stars
    26
  • 3 Stars
    12
  • 2 Stars
    4
  • 1 Stars
    1

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars
  • M
  • 01-12-16

Tedious self - regarding and dull

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

A different story. Less plodding performance. Bought on the back of 5 sar reviews in the Irish Tmes newspaper. - very disappointed.

What could Maggie Nelson have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Anything - humourless and po faced, completely without drama. Dreadful.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

Flat bland delivery. But with those words, it would be hard to do better.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from The Argonauts?

Take it back and start again. It was people with no real problems navel gazing. Who cares what your sexuality is ? Get over it, be glad you found love. The book made men looks like aliens - I'm a woman btw. Absolutely teenage in its internal referencing . Shocking really for an adult.

Any additional comments?

Widen your interests author. Try a joke or an elegant phrase. Stop reading Hemingway, way too much sequential obviousness"....we did this and then we did that. ...

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Drags

There's no engagement, just a drag to read. No sense of discovery, of the writer's joy, pain, frustration, heartache, etc... to events unfolding. Nothing to emotionally cling onto. Nothing driving it forward.

It leaves you feeling depleted. The monotone voice doesn't help matters. Just difficult to listen to / read. You don't want to spend any time with the writer, there's no warmth there; no passion or sense things moving along. A lack of a sense of journey through ideas.

The ideas are interesting though, it's just the presentation, the journey, and the structure of it that's lacking. If you're already interested in the topics, you'll be interested in this, but Nelson isn't bringing anyone on board who might disagree with her opinions at the start of the text.

"Sometimes, when I'm teaching, when I interject a comment without anyone calling on me, without caring that I just spoke a moment before, or when I interrupt someone to redirect the conversation away from an eddy I personally find fruitless, I feel high on the knowledge that I can talk as much as I want to, as quickly as I want to, in any direction that I want to, without anyone overtly rolling her eyes at me or suggesting I go to speech therapy. I'm not saying this is good pedagogy. I am saying that its pleasures are deep."

Just read that.

They say you shouldn't confine a dolphin in concrete tanks because the endless sound of their own sonar bouncing back at them eventually drives them mad. That's the best metaphor for how reading this book felt. Inward-looking, self-obsessed writing. You're meant to talk at length about yourself in an autobiography, but this is unengaging and self-indulgent.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Not for Razzle fans.

Imteresting exploration of contemporary feminist issues influenced by the post structuralist work of Judith Butler through the lens of the life of a lesbian mother.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

CAN NOT THE AUTHOR READ THE BOOK

Sounds dull and self-indulgent with abstract compacting of structuralist thought. Tedious. Frustrating. Bring it to life.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Even better read out loud

A hugely inspiring literary experience , which I enjoyed even more as read by the author than reading it myself (which I loved!) She started out writing poetry & that comes through in the delivery. Bravo.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Gorgeous

Love this book so much and the author’s voice is so soothing and inviting
Beautiful writing
Highly recommended

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Yes.

All I have to say is “yes”. Innovative and brainy, yes; but never at the cost of its driving force: feeling. This book is incredibly grounded, and brings the “angels (of philosophy) back down to earth”, to tell them (and us) about the realities that lofty languages often fail to completely describe. Writing. Thinking. Queerness. Sex. Memory. Identity. Childhood. Development. Relationality. Motherhood. Nelson doesn’t have THE answers, but she has hers - and offers them knowing that this, too, is “good enough”. Absolutely brilliant and evocative in equal measure. Blew my mind with alarming pace.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Keep your ship afloat in these challenging times

Saw this recommended elsewhere and thought I would follow the random thread. It was perfect as serendipity often is. Love MN’s style and am looking forward to her other work. So rich with thought, subject and sources. Truly inspired.

I will listen to it 5 times and still get more from it.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!