On Freedom: The electrifying new book from the author of The Argonauts

Like Maggie very much good stuff keep writing, more.

On Freedom is a collection of linked, highly anticipated essays about the nature, complexities and paradoxes of freedom and a heady, iconoclastic work of cultural criticism that examines the concept of freedom through the lenses of art, climate, drugs and sex. Compared to Nelson’s previous books, this certainly feels significantly more academic than just casual reading. Rather than focus on moments of liberation, the book explores how we balance our need to care for and protect others with our need for individual space to move, think, organise, express and imagine. Maggie Nelson is one of the most esteemed writers of our day, and her extraordinary mind is in full bloom in this new work. It is a panoptic survey of a huge range of art and ideas. Nelson is one of the most exciting and original thinkers at work today, and this is one of those books that only comes along once a decade or so and that engages with the most complex, urgent and fascinating issues of our time, from the personal to the civic.It is also a hugely important thinking book that will open up new ways of understanding the world, will be read for many years to come and will no doubt make a profound impact on the world of ideas and the world of letters. Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Nelson's On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint explores how we might think, experience or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. She examines her abiding interest in the ‘practices of freedom’ by which we negotiate our interrelation with – and our inseparability from – others, with all the care and constraint that relationship entails while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion. For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture – from the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis – is itself a practice of freedom.It is a means of forging fortitude, courage and company in which she explores ideas of queerness, care and freedom yet so much more. It is an expansive, exhilarating work and a boundary-pushing, provocative read which is fascinating and thought-provoking in equal measure. She explains throughout that the contemporary discourses she has chosen are for good reason. Art is a natural fit: she’s taught art and writes about art. She calls art, along with sexual freedom, her “most native ground.” Her section on drugs and addiction is “more niche, esoteric, but as a sober person I’m interested in substance abuse—the idea of being enslaved, enthralled.” And climate “is what’s on everyone’s mind.” This book is a contribution to the cultural conversation in which Nelson takes the loftiest ideas and tethers them to the ground; she makes important things legible and there’s a warmth to her writing. Also, she doesn’t come to answers but poses questions. The book is full of thinking and feeling and nuanced analysis written in fluid prose. Highly recommended.