Maple Street Book Club focuses on The Argonauts with Elizabeth Gross

The seventh meeting of the Maple Street Book Shop will take place at 6 p.m. on Thursday, August 11, at the Maple Street Book Shop (7529 Maple Street).

This month, Elizabeth Gross will be the guest facilitator, and she’s picked The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. The book club choice is available at 10% off at the store. Refreshments will be served. No sign-up is necessary to attend the club.

Elizabeth Gross is a local poet and translator. Her poems have recently appeared in the Fairy Tale Review, TENDERLOIN, Painted Bride Quarterly, and LEVELER. She co-translated and produced a new adaptation of Euripides’ Bakkhai at the Marigny Opera House in June 2015.

From the publisher:

“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 artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.

Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals like 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 childrearing. Nelson’s insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.”