Like Love Essays and Conversations

‘One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation’ OLIVIA LAING

What can freedom really mean? In this invigorating, essential book, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about the concept in ways that are responsive to our divided world. Drawing on pop culture, theory and the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, she follows freedom – with all its complexities – through four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. On Freedom offers a bold new perspective on the challenging times in which we live.

‘Tremendously energising’ Guardian

‘This provocative meditation…shows Nelson at her most original and brilliant’ New York Times

‘Nelson is such a friend to her reader, such brilliant company… Exhilarating’ Literary Review

* A New York Times Notable Book *
* A Guardian and TLS ‘Books of 2021’ Pick *

*A GUARDIAN ‘BOOKS OF 2021’ PICK*

‘One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation’ – Olivia Laing

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom’s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.

Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing \”practices of freedom\” by which we negotiate our interrelation with-indeed, our inseparability from-others, with all the care and constraint that relation entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.

For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture-from recent art world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis-is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.

Title: On Freedom Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Author: MAGGIE NELSON
Format: Hardback
Publication date: 07/09/2021
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Pages: 288
Weight: 581g
Dimension: 234mm X 162mm

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 centre is a romance- the story of the author’s relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’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 for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.