Recommendations
Books Like The Argonauts
Best books to read after The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
If The Argonauts moved you — the way it holds love story and queer theory and pregnancy memoir and philosophical meditation in a single continuous text, Nelson's willingness to think alongside the hardest questions about gender and embodiment and family — these eight books share its hybrid form, its queer intellectual tradition, or its engagement with what it means to build a life and a family outside the available scripts.
- 1Buy
Fun Home
by Alison Bechdel
Bechdel's graphic memoir about her father's secret homosexuality and her own coming out — the most direct companion to The Argonauts in the queer memoir tradition: both are organized around the relationship between queerness and family, both use literary references as structural elements (Bechdel uses the Western literary canon, Nelson uses critical theory), and both are organized around the question of what queer life and queer family can look like
- 2Buy
Bluets
by Maggie Nelson
240 numbered propositions about the color blue, and about heartbreak — Nelson's earlier hybrid prose poem is the direct companion to The Argonauts in her work: both refuse conventional generic categories, both organize personal experience through theoretical and aesthetic frameworks, and both treat the prose paragraph as a unit of thinking rather than a unit of narrative
- 3Buy
The Lover
by Marguerite Duras
Duras's hybrid memoir about her affair with a Chinese man in colonial Indochina — the French literary ancestor of The Argonauts in its refusal to separate autobiography from fiction from theory; Duras's influence on the French feminist theory that Nelson draws on is explicit, and The Argonauts is in direct dialogue with the tradition of autotheory that writers like Duras and Hélène Cixous established
- 4Buy
Gender Trouble
by Judith Butler
Butler's foundational work of gender theory — Nelson engages extensively with Butler in The Argonauts, sometimes agreeing and sometimes diverging, and readers who want to understand the theoretical framework within which Nelson's argument about gender and embodiment is made will find Gender Trouble essential; reading Nelson alongside Butler illuminates both works
- 5Buy
A Lover's Discourse
by Roland Barthes
Barthes's fragments about the experience of being in love — one of the foundational texts of The Argonauts in Nelson's work: the title of The Argonauts comes from Barthes's meditation on 'I love you,' and Nelson's method of interweaving quotation with personal narrative is in direct dialogue with Barthes's approach to autobiography and theory
- 6Buy
Redefining Realness
by Janet Mock
Janet Mock's memoir about growing up trans and poor in Hawaii and finding herself through writing — the companion to The Argonauts in the trans memoir tradition: where Nelson writes about queerness and gender fluidity from the outside (as the partner of a trans person), Mock writes about trans identity from the inside; together they give complementary perspectives on the experience of gender transition and the construction of queer family
- 7Buy
Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
David, an American in Paris, unable to acknowledge his love for an Italian man — Baldwin's novel is one of the canonical works of queer literary fiction that The Argonauts implicitly responds to: the closet, the inability to acknowledge love, the cost of refusing to live as who you are — all of which The Argonauts engages with from a position of relative social openness that was not available to Baldwin's David; recommended for readers who want to understand the queer literary tradition that The Argonauts extends
- 8Buy
The Empathy Exams
by Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison's essay collection about pain, empathy, and the ethics of feeling other people's suffering — the closest formal companion to The Argonauts in the contemporary essay tradition: both books are organized around the attempt to think rigorously about personal experience through theoretical frameworks, both refuse the distinction between emotional and intellectual writing, and both are organized around a question about the nature of human connection
More The Argonauts Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.