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How long does it take to read The Argonauts?

Maggie Nelson

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson takes about 3 hours 22 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 3 hours 22 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2015. 184 pages, about 50,600 words.

7 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 5 hours 37 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 3 hours 22 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 7 minutes

The page count is the median across 13 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

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, 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 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.

Subjects: Motherhood, Sexual minorities' families, Family, Pregnancy, Transgender parents, Gay parents

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