
The Argonauts
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Narrated by:
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Maggie Nelson
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By:
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Maggie Nelson
About this listen
National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Criticism, 2015.
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.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Featured Article: The top 100 memoirs of all time
All genres considered, the memoir is among the most difficult and complex for a writer to pull off. After all, giving voice to your own lived experience and recounting deeply painful or uncomfortable memories in a way that still engages and entertains is a remarkable feat. These autobiographies, often narrated by the authors themselves, shine with raw, unfiltered emotion sure to resonate with any listener. But don't just take our word for it—queue up any one of these listens, and you'll hear exactly what we mean.

Editor's Pick
A game-changer in audio
"Remember how much of a game-changer this title was when it came out? This was that title everyone was talking about—and rightfully so. It’s inventive, intelligent, and beautiful. And made all the better by Maggie Nelson’s narration."
—Aaron S., Audible Editor
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Story
Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the 20th-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel.
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Wonderful book, mediocre narration
- By Melina on 11-14-17
By: Maggie Nelson
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Train Dreams
- A Novella
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 2 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world.
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2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist
- By Louis on 06-20-12
By: Denis Johnson
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Pulphead
- Essays
- By: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Narrated by: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - how we really (no, really) live now.
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Interesting Perspectives
- By Nancy on 09-05-24
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We the Animals
- By: Justin Torres
- Narrated by: Frankie J. Alvarez
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Three brothers tear their way through childhood—smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.
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I want my credit back!
- By Van Gilder on 09-02-11
By: Justin Torres
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On Freedom
- Four Songs of Care and Constraint
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Just great
- By Kristi Strong on 12-14-21
By: Maggie Nelson
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The Days of Abandonment
- By: Elena Ferrante
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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An IndiBound best seller, The Days of Abandonment shocked and captivated its Italian public when first published. It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband, with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.
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D.I.V.O.R.C.E.
- By Margaret M. Cranston on 01-18-16
By: Elena Ferrante
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The Flamethrowers
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Kushner
- Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
- Length: 15 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Reno, so-called because of the place of her birth, comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity—artists colonize a deserted and industrial SoHo, stage actions in the East Village, blur the line between life and art. Reno is submitted to a sentimental education of sorts—by dreamers, poseurs, and raconteurs in New York and by radicals in Italy, where she goes with her lover to meet his estranged and formidable family.
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Overrated
- By Amazon Customer on 09-30-24
By: Rachel Kushner
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The Savage Detectives
- A Novel
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: Eddie Lopez, Armando Durán
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.
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Bolaño Poetic Gyre
- By Darwin8u on 11-14-14
By: Roberto Bolaño
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Runaway
- Stories
- By: Alice Munro
- Narrated by: Kymberly Dakin
- Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Three stories concern the same woman - in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls' school into a wild love affair; in the second, she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her vanished child turns up caught in the grip of a religious cult. In these and other stories Alice Munro's understanding of the people about whom she writes makes their lives as real as our own.
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Poor Audio Quality
- By David on 04-02-10
By: Alice Munro
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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
- Complete Collection
- By: Lydia Davis
- Narrated by: Mia Barron, Thérèse Plummer, Jonathan Davis
- Length: 21 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers, a storyteller celebrated for her emotional acuity, her formal inventiveness, and her ability to capture the mind in overdrive. She has been called "an American virtuoso of the short story form" ( Salon.com ) and "one of the quiet giants... of American fiction" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review ). This volume contains all her stories to date, from the acclaimed "Break It Down" (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee "Varieties of Disturbance".
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Intro & Outro’s Ruin It
- By Amazon Customer on 09-06-20
By: Lydia Davis
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How to Be Both
- A Novel
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: John Banks
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
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Incompetent Foreign Pronunciation
- By J. Kahn on 06-28-15
By: Ali Smith
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Men We Reaped
- A Memoir
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write, she realized the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.
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Tough but important
- By Jermell Powell on 09-26-21
By: Jesmyn Ward
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On Beauty
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 18 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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This wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.
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Somewhat Disappointed
- By Cherokee on 11-15-05
By: Zadie Smith
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Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Maggie Nelson
- Length: 1 hr and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth is an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio. Something of a companion piece to 2009’s Bluets, Pathemata merges a pain diary chronicling a decade of jaw pain with dreams and dailies, eventually blurring the lines between embodied, unconscious, and everyday life.
By: Maggie Nelson
What listeners say about The Argonauts
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- redhidari
- 10-01-15
A relaxing meditation on identity, gender and art
A friend close to the author told me numerous times to read this book. Because I was in school, because I had no time to read, because I was busy raising hell, I put it off. After getting a punishing job that has left me no time for reading I decided to take his advice and buy the audiobook for my long LA commutes. I finally understood the parallels he saw and the radical voice of Maggie I feel is a commonality. I should have read the book but I would have missed out on the author's soothing voice. I would have missed the slight intonation she gave to certain subjects or the correct pronunciation of the names of theorists I had never known how to properly pronounce. This is a beautiful, meditative and at times painfully personal story. What a gift that Harry and Maggie allowed the world in. The ideas, the stories and her voice will stay with me for a very long time. Well done.
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28 people found this helpful
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- roy ben shai
- 02-26-25
Uneven but significant
The “autotheoretical” form of writing here is innovative and there are very powerful sections and wise observations, especially the end, which is excellent. But it is uneven. I can’t say I enjoyed listening through the whole thing, especially given that the reading (by the author!!) is really god awful (monotonous etc.) I don’t know if this is some deliberate choice and if so why, but it doesn’t help…
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- Celestial Heyoka
- 03-21-21
I cried so much.
it took forever to finish because it was too good. I had to continually stop and take breaks like the Tibetan book of the dead. I am forever changed.
careful it is a weighty book.
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- Courtney
- 01-24-18
Powerful, thoughtful, vulnerable in all the right ways.
I’ve read and re-read and listened to this book. It’s academic and accessible in equal parts. It’s moving and poignant and reads almost like fiction. I love it
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- Christina Harris
- 01-06-23
Profoundly fascinating yet incredibly boring
The subject matter, ideas and concepts presented in this book are utterly fascinating. I’m not a fan of the wringing style and the monotonous narration made it worse.
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- AM Reader
- 03-30-24
Excellent Narrative!
Wonderfully written and insightful. I loved hearing this read by the author. A must read for the human experience.
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- Sharlotte
- 09-09-17
Mixed Feelings. Strange Book
I found this book frustratingly elusive and lacking linear organization, although there were some interesting points in her stream of thought and ongoing reflections. The narration was mixed as well. Nelson has a beautiful, clear voice, but her reading is methodical and distant. I would not particularly recommend this book because it's too obtuse, even for my quirky taste.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Mara
- 05-12-16
So intense
This is the most important book I read since Between the World and Me.
Intense and electrifying and amazing! I'll definitely be re reading this many many times
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7 people found this helpful
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- ryan
- 02-09-17
wonderful
this book is stupefyingly complete. maggie nelson is one of our living geniuses. life, death, birth, sex, shit, piss, nelsons prose is unwaveringly fair, as if I journalist, and poetic, Full of curiosity and passion for life.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Homer
- 09-14-17
Strange, beautiful, thoughtful, alien
The book sort of starts, and a few hours later sort of ends. In between is a dense, non-frivolous, thought-provoking extended essay on sexuality, gender, pregnancy, birth, and parenthood. It is not autobiography. It is using autobiography as a springboard for thought and reflection. I live in what the author might term a "hetero-normative" world, and was glad that she took me on this tour of this alien land. An interesting and powerful listening experience. Bravo.
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1 person found this helpful