We’re excited to share that our August Book Club Book Club selection is On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson, forthcoming from Graywolf Press on September 7, but available to Rumpus Book Club members in just a few weeks!
So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom’s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.
Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing “practices of freedom” by which we negotiate our interrelation with—indeed, our inseparability from—others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion. For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture—from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis—is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company.
“[Maggie Nelson] traces the limits of liberty and the call to care in this expansive and sharp-eyed study… Nelson turns each thought until it is finely honed and avoids binaries and bromides. While the literary theorizing is rich, this account soars in its ability to find nuance in considering questions of enormous importance… Once again, Nelson proves herself a masterful thinker and an unparalleled prose stylist.” – Publishers Weekly, starred review
Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Club by July 15 to join us in reading On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, culminating in an exclusive online discussion with author Maggie Nelson about the book!
