Like Love: Essays and Conversations

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One of the Globe and Mail‘s most anticipated books of 2024

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 Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.

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.One of the Globe and Mail‘s most anticipated books of 2024

“Maggie Nelson’s shimmering genius is on full display in this collection. Like Love not only spans the breadth of her generous and supple thinking but also highlights the steadfast consistency of her principles, which seek to elucidate the aesthetic, moral, and political conditions that could expand our notion of human coexistence. I’m grateful for her theories that always bring light to the murk, that hold and think through opposing arguments to find the meridian points between. Like Love is a celebration of friendship and outlaw communities of artists and writers that demonstrates how we can hold onto love as we hurtle uncertainly into the future.”
—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor FeelingsMAGGIE NELSON is the author of several books of prose and poetry including The Red Parts, Bluets, the National Book Critics Circle Award–winner The Argonauts, and On Freedom. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.CA

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