An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family 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. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and "family." An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

Stung by a flying insect whose bite unleashes a strange flood of memories, Lester Ordway joins forces with the medical techologist Pilar Ramirez, and entomologist Maybelle Terwilliger to investigate the strange swarm.

The story of Jason and the Argonauts is one of the most famous in Greek myth, and its development from the oldest layers of Greek mythology down to the modern age encapsulates the dramatic changes in faith, power and culture that Western civilization has seen over the past three millennia. From the Bronze Age to the Classical Age, from the medieval world to today, the Jason story has been told and retold with new stories, details and meanings. This book explores the epic history of a colorful myth and probes the most ancient origins of the quest for the Golden Fleece--a quest that takes us to the very dawn of Greek religion and its close relationship with Near Eastern peoples and cultures.

Few classical stories are as exciting as that of Jason and the Golden Fleece. The legend of the boy, who discovers a new identity as son of a usurped king and leads a crew of demi-gods and famous heroes, has resonated through the ages, rumbling like the clashing rocks, which almost pulverised the Argo. The myth and its reception inspires endless engagements: while it tells of a quest to the ends of the earth, of the tyrants Pelias and Aetes, of dragons' teeth, of the loss of Hylas (beloved of Hercules) stolen away by nymphs, and of Jason's seduction of the powerful witch Medea (later betrayed for a more useful princess), it speaks to us of more: of gender and sexuality; of heroism and lost integrity; of powerful gods and terrifying monsters; of identity and otherness; of exploration and exploitation. The Argonauts are emblems of collective heroism, yet also of the emptiness of glory. From Pindar to J. W. Waterhouse, Apollonius of Rhodes to Ray Harryhausen, and Robert Graves to Mary Zimmerman, the Argonaut myth has produced later interpretations as rich, salty and complex as the ancient versions. Helen Lovatt here unravels, like untangled sea-kelp, the diverse strands of the narrative and its numerous and fascinating afterlives. Her book will prove both informative and endlessly entertaining to those who love classical literature and myth.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.