Like Love: Essays and Conversations

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A career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artists Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide - from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Kara Walker to Bjork - but certain themes recur- intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression and perversity; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making. The collection is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development as a writer, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists. Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.Like Love is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development as a writer, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.

Reviews

Like Love may be one of the most movingly specific, the most lovingly unruly celebrations of the ethics of friendship we have * Guardian *
A polyphonic assemblage . . . Graceful and aesthetic, deftly crossing boundaries and definitions, a concordant symphony * Irish Times *
Maggie Nelson is one of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic -- Sinad Gleeson
To read Like Love is to watch [Nelson] circling issues of gender and sexuality, but refracted through a variety of different prisms, so that the end result is a constellation of ideas that seem to be expanding outwards * Telegraph *
Nelsons admiration and enthusiasm for her subjects is a palpable driver of joy and delight . . . A revelatory gathering of beloved art and artists presented with distinctive prose * Kirkus (starred review) *
Maggie Nelson's shimmering genius is on full display in this collection -- Cathy Park Hong
Drawn from nearly twenty years of genre-defying author Maggie Nelsons work, Like Love offers incisive commentary on topics ranging from music and literature to feminism and queerness to motherhood and love * TIME *
We have a sense, I think, of the false border sequestering art from theory. And so to remark on Maggie Nelsons facility in mating the two is to say the least about how she does so which is with a hurtling gusto that nonetheless invites us to pause and think * New Yorker *
Like Love is a convergence of the most incandescent parts of Maggie Nelsons inimitable craft -- Johanna Hedva
A luminous gathering of dispatches from the delicate adventure of thinking alongside other people. Like Love is a reminder of wow -- Jeremy Atherton Lin
One of the most wonderful, poetic minds of this generation * Paste *
A pleasure to read: incisive, smart and witty, it will leave you looking and love and life anew * i *

Author Bio

Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts, and most recently in the UK, Bluets. She teaches at University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.