Gosh. I so wanted to like this one, and while I'm thankful to the publisher, author, and Netgalley, this one wasn't for me.

Like Love is primarily a collection of conversations with artists/thinkers with some essays included along a similar vein. Maggie Nelson is someone who is constantly challenging form and structure, and here what she's able to do is put twenty years of conversations into conversation with one another. It's like a time capsule tracing twenty years of discourse on art, power, detournement, affect, sex, violence, trauma, and freedom. I particularly loved the sections with Bjork - who I love - and Carolee Schneemann - who I hadn't known about. This collection offers a lot to think about and brings to light some subversive artists that aren't necessarily garnering mainstream attention.

Anyone who has an interest in queer, transgressive art will find some moving conversations in this collection.

I thank NetGalley and Graywolf Press for this arc.

When I see a new MAGGIE NELSON collection pop up under "Find Titles" there is no need to research further--I just hit request. Thank you #NetGalley and #GraywolfPress for providing an advance copy of this collection, very grateful for that. I have read five books by this author: Bluets, Argonauts, Jane: A Murder, The Red Parts, and now Like Love. This last collection was wholly unlike any of the other books I mentioned and was much more academic and knowledge-specific (people, places, concepts, theories) than the others as well. For that reason, a number of the essays grabbed me quickly and easily (specifically "conversations" with Brian Blanchard, Bjork, Eileen Myles, and essays on Prince and Trees). There were numerous references to Nelson's other books Art of Cruelty and On Freedom and I am looking forward to reading them in the near future.

I also found a number of the essays/interviews long and cumbersome to get through, but have no doubt that individuals more familiar with the sociocultural topics and content will be enthralled by them. Regardless, I learned so much (whether I found the content personally interesting or not). Even for the topics that did not resonate or interviews that felt too in-depth and/or beyond my comprehension, I still made notes on things I wanted to look into further (especially related to art and women's history). Because of the way I read, especially nonfiction, I made a list of individuals I intend to research further. Maggie Nelson has been a primary inspiration for my own nonfiction writing and sets a high bar on what can be created via this wide genre. She has changed the landscape of creative nonfiction for me and many other people and she rocks.

So while this is NOT Bluets or Argonauts (though both are mentioned intermittently throughout) nor Jane/The Red Parts (both SO good), it is ALL Maggie Nelson and fans of hers (and of great writing, art, acceptance, and vulnerability) will enjoy it very much.

I am a fan of Maggie Nelson, so I was excited to read "Like Love." The essays in this collection are carefully written, and require careful reading, I found that I couldn't casually read them on the train but that they required more attention that some novels I recently read. If you enjoy long-form articles in The New Yorker, even The Economist, I think you will find that this is a satisfying read! Something unique about this book is the perspective Nelson brings on people like Prince, and if you have read other work by her, you may find that this reading experience enhances your experience of those works (almost a Better Call Saul-Breaking Bad relationship :) )

please don't pull a me, please don't see this title and think this is maggie nelson giving you a collection of essays about love.

it's not that these essays don't include love, it's just that most of these essays already exist in the public sphere - previous interviews with figures like bjork, a forward written for the rerelease of samantha hunt's <i>the seas</i>, an academic essay breaking down hilton als' ability to write subversively without alienating too many readers - and are more about maggie's love for her subjects.

perhaps the most interesting part of this collection is less the essays themselves and more the fact that they're arranged chronologically - disseminating pieces of maggie's lore pertaining to the construction of bluets, of the red parts, of the argonauts - giving insight to her writing processes and how they evolve over time. it was interesting to me to read about her avoiding jacqueline rose's work in the process of writing out of fear of failure in the harsh light of comparison versus how other writers - i'm thinking darcey steinke's - seemed to motivate her by comparison. there's a four year difference between the two essays which does make you wonder if, as was touched on during the essay with sarah lucas, this is a part of diminishing potential, if by aging we're all not just harangued by the notion that new accomplishments are gradating away and it becomes more difficult not to look at ourselves through the lens of other people.

another interesting part of maggie's evolutionary journey in these works was the paradigm shift of the pandemic. harping back to the conversation with jacqueline rose, maggie notes that on freedom was drafted pre-2020, but revisions through the bulk of a year had to take place at home in the presence of a child when she had only ever gone through that process in the sanctity of privacy. the work didn't change, but the world in which it needed to be performed did.

so yes, a possibly unnecessary collection of works you may or may not have consume before made new in how they show you the cartography of maggie's life, the world, and how her work was impacted by both.

breaking this book to a granular level is also possible. some essays, for me, were ultimately skippable because i was either not interested or not able to engage. some were essays that i want to revisit after consuming more work about the subject. fred moten's black and blur has since become a piece of interest for me, as is ben lerner's 10:04. lerner's felt lovingly pieced apart, moten's just felt sublime. a few standouts for me were the epistolary piece with bjork, whose letters to maggie felt as though could have expanded into their own isolated volume of poetry, plus a piece about prince inspiring and fostering maggie's burgeoning sexuality in childhood.

this book is absolutely rife with maggie's usual fair of conversations about gender, sexuality, capitalism, feminism, and the making of art and the drive to create. regardless of whatever you're seeking to find here, you'll uncover something - these are not works about love, but they also are.

the thing about collecting everything an author has ever written about a subject as broad as "art," as she wrote it with no future awareness of its looming collection, is that you definitionally are kinda taking the good with the bad.

i'm not new york-y, in so many ways: i don't pay a lot in rent, i'm not adventurous, i stay inside a lot, and i don't know how to even begin to understand abstract art. i don't think i'm above it. quite the opposite. i would never be like "my four year old could create this painting / bash this barbie's head in / create this sculpture that is a talking refrigerator." i'm closer to the four year old — it just goes over my head.

i loved the parts of this that included maggie nelson in conversation with interesting people, including those i hadn't heard of and those i had. i loved the parts that were explorations of things i know, or of books.

but for me, there is only so much blood and sh*t and gore and violence smashed into a canvas or a polaroid or film recording i can bear.

i always love maggie nelson but she is way cooler than me. this was made up of exclusively the cooler than me parts.

Like Love is a collection of essays and interviews spanning around 20 years of Maggie Nelson’s career. I love Nelson’s work and came into this expecting to fall in love with it, and there were certainly parts I did fall in love with—I found the interviews especially illuminating, and I enjoyed the literary criticism. Much of the book, though, is art criticism, and art criticism of a variety that seems to presume a familiarity with the artist and/or the work—some of which can’t be found online with simple google searches. I found myself lost—or losing interest—a few times for this reason.

It’s an admirable collection insofar as it attempts (I think) to get around the problem of “How do I turn a bunch of disparate pieces into a book?” by showing that the same preoccupations with art, and love of certain artists, have followed Nelson around throughout her career—it was very interesting to see the names of these artists recur in various contexts, to show how Nelson situations them in place with one another. But I found myself wishing that there had been attempts to better familiarize me with the objects of criticism in question; when the object remains obscured there’s only so much insight one can draw from the writer’s circumlocutions, I think. Suddenly this feels like a broader philosophical take than I had intended to make when I sat down to write this, so feel free to challenge me; something something epistemology. Maybe more to the point, that kind of criticism—if it exists—would I think function on the presumption of the reader’s lack of familiarity. I mentioned earlier I enjoyed the literary criticism more, and that’s probably telling about me as a reader: I am much more familiar with the world of literature and of literary criticism than I am of visual art, so it’s unsurprising that I felt able to draw more from those sections than I did those about visual art.

In any case, like much of Nelson’s work, this is probably something I will return to.

A new Maggie Nelson book is always cause for celebration. Here, in "Like Love" Maggie explores what is something that is "like love, but not love" in a myriad of colors and ways, expanding our minds in the process. Much thanks to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for the opportunity to read another one of Maggie's amazing works.

A gift to live in the same timeline as Maggie Nelson!!!!!! One of my favorite thinkers and writers of all time.