Keynote
A career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artists
Book Title
Like Love
Subtitle
Essays and Conversations
Cover Image
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2024
A Time, Kirkus, Paste Magazine, Real Simple, Literary Hub, and Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2024
Body
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.
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.
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About the Author
Credit: Sarah St Clair Renard
Praise
“We have a sense, I think, of the false border sequestering art from theory. And so to remark on Maggie Nelson’s 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.”—Lauren Michele Jackson, The New Yorker
- “Like Love is a personal intellectual genealogy, both a chart of Nelson’s influences, collaborators, and intimate friendships, and a map of her mind at work. . . . Throughout Like Love, Nelson is herself a poet of the question spirit.”—Walton Muyumba, The Boston Globe
- “Penetrating and lucid. . . . Every essay is a master class in close looking. . . . Nelson’s insights are vital and sustaining.”—Booklist, starred review
- “Readers can practically watch Nelson’s incisive mind growing and changing as she speaks with colleagues such as Hilton Als and Judith Butler, or as she writes about queerness, motherhood, violence, the lyrics of Prince and the devastating loss of a friend.”—Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
