Maggie Nelson has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 38 ratings. The most-rated is The Argonauts.
The Argonauts
Summary
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.
The Red Parts
Summary
A chilling genre-busting memoir by a major American essayist Late in 2004, Maggie Nelson was looking forward to the publication of her book, Jane: A Murder, a narrative in verse about the life and death of her aunt, who had been murdered 35 years before. The case remained unsolved, but Jane was assumed to have been the victim of an infamous serial killer in Michigan in 1969. Then, one November afternoon, Nelson received a call from her mother, who announced that the case had been reopened; a new suspect would be arrested and tried on the basis of a DNA match. Over the months that followed, Nelson found herself attending the trial with her mother and reflecting anew on the aura of dread and fear that hung over her family and childhood - an aura that derived not only from the terrible facts of her aunt's murder but also from her own complicated journey through sisterhood, daughterhood, and girlhood. The Red Parts is a memoir, an account of a trial, and a provocative essay that interrogates the American obsession with violence and missing white women and that scrupulously explores the nature of grief, justice, and empathy.
©2007 Maggie Nelson. Preface to the paperback edition © 2016 by Maggie Nelson (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Art of Cruelty
Summary
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. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.
©2011 Maggie Nelson (P)2017 Tantor
Bluets
Summary
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.... Since 2009, when it first published, to today, Bluets has drawn scores of readers and listeners with its surprising insights into the emotional depths that make us most human - via 240 short pieces, at once lyrical and philosophical, on the color blue. This new edition celebrates Maggie Nelson’s uncompromising vision, inviting longtime fans and newcomers alike to experience and share in an indispensable work that continues to disrupt the literary landscape.
©2009 Maggie Nelson (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing
Playing Dead
Summary
A darkly comic inquiry into how to fake your own death, the disappearance industry, and the lengths to which people will go to be reborn. Is it still possible to fake your own death in the 21st century? With six figures of student loan debt, Elizabeth Greenwood is tempted to find out. So she sets off on a foray into the world of death fraud, where for $30,000 a consultant can make you disappear - but your suspicious insurance company might hire a private detective to dig up your coffin...only to find it filled with rocks. Greenwood tracks down a man who staged a kayaking accident and then returned to live in his own house while all his neighbors thought he was dead. She takes a call from Michael Jackson (yes, he's alive - or so some would have her believe); talks to people contemplating pseudocide; and gathers intel on black market morgues in the Philippines, where she may or may not succeed in obtaining some fraudulent goodies of her own. Along the way she learns that love is a much less common motive than money and that making your death look like a drowning virtually guarantees you'll be caught. (Disappearing while hiking, however, is a great way to go.) Playing Dead is an utterly fascinating and charmingly bizarre investigation into our all-too-human desire to escape from the lives we lead and the men and women desperate enough to lose their identities - and their families - to begin again.
©2016 Elizabeth Greenwood (P)2016 Simon & Schuster