With insight and intellectual rigour Nelson wrestles the concept of "freedom" away from its contemporary political misuses and explores what it means in the context of art, sex, drugs and climate.

Part of what makes [Nelson's] writing so compelling is a comfort with uncertainty... It is a delight to spend time with Nelson's erudite mind.

Nelson is such a friend to her reader, such brilliant company. Her book is a nuanced, exhilarating rallying cry for all those who are tired of the drab norms of our tech-topia and who long for another conversation

[Nelson's] books vary between an academic or lyrical register, but all revel in the recognition that feeling and thought aren't fixed... They encourage a slowing down, an absorbing... [and a] willingness for intellectual and linguistic exploration.

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.

Maggie Nelson is an expert at distilling whatever topic she tackles into crystalline prose. She is the queen of the effortless jumping off point, catapulting her readers into the far reaches of Big Questions.

Maggie Nelson needs no genre. Reading her books... tends to make classification of any kind feel destructive, like it would slice through her writing's vital connective tissue... Reading Nelson is like watching a prima ballerina deliver the performance of a lifetime: athletic, graceful, and awe-inspiring.

A top cultural critic plucks the concept of freedom away from right-wing sloganeers and explores its operation in current artistic and political conversations. . . . The subtlety of Nelson's analysis and energy of her prose refresh the mind and spirit.

Profound . . . wide-ranging essays analyzing freedom as it relates to the arts, sexuality, addiction, and, perhaps surprisingly, climate change. . . . A heady mix of erudite analysis and personal revelation. . . . Nelson brings a critically nuanced appreciation of individual and societal freedom to her mapping of the minefields involved in simultaneously embracing liberty and jettisoning habits of control and paranoia that threaten liberation.

On Freedom proves that Nelson continues to do us a great service as a critic, which is to herself digest, and sometimes wrestle with, copious amounts of literature and theory . . . and to integrate this material into a relatively short book, in an accessible, felicitous voice all Nelson's own.

Maggie Nelson's books crack your heart open on a marble countertop and piece it back together, but not before you've thought critically about your entire life. Her writing leaves you smarter, even if it sometimes contains truths that are hard to swallow. Her latest work is an essay collection that meditates on the concept of freedom, drawing on ideas from pop culture and critical theory, which is sure to explore your brain in the best way.

Nelson makes her case persuasively, marshalling a chorus of thinkers alongside her own experience. One model of freedom, On Freedom suggests, lies in choosing - and arguing for - one's definition of freedom itself.

You'll . . . find lots to keep you engaged-provocative ideas, thinkers you've never heard of and a vast encyclopedia of cultural references.

The venerable Maggie Nelson weighs in with the long-awaited follow-up to her masterpiece The Argonauts. On Freedom is a characteristically thoughtful and expansive work of cultural criticism that digs into this fraught topic through the lens of art, sex, drugs, and climate.

Nelson is so outrageously gifted a writer and thinker.

Transcendent.... very inspiring. She's an amazing writer.

A writer who plays with prose and remakes the genre.

Maggie Nelson... She's so much better than anything I've read for a long, long time.

The book that changed my life... it's just brilliant.

Always beguiling, her writing is powerful, incisive and so singular that it defies categorization ... raw, honest and urgent... [Nelson] always prompt me to see some aspect of life very differently.

On Freedom is brave, sprawling, more troublesome than trouble-shooting - and in the spirit of Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble, quoted here by Nelson, that's just as it should be.

Maggie Nelson writes with a luminosity that is, upon opening any one of her books, immediately enlivening.

A patient and astringent analysis of what we owe each other and what we owe ourselves, and how to balance the two demands.

Beautiful and shocking, but ultimately so gloriously hopeful. The book we should all read as we emerge from this latest strangeness.

I can't remember a book I've wanted to press into people's hands more this year than this resonant, immensely thoughtful look back at three generations of a farming family ... Managing to cram the whole modern history of British farming and nature into 270 beautifully written pages, this is a gem that's moving and immensely informative.

A rare and urgent book ... Its beauty is not only in the writing but in what is behind it: a gentle and wise sensibility that is alive to the human love affair with the land and yet also intimately cognisant of our collective and systematic cruelty towards it.

I think, genuinely, this is the best book I've read this year, and one of the most important books of recent years. It is about food and farming, and how we eat what we eat. It's about progress and nostalgia, without being prideful or mawkish, it's about families and tradition, and the passing of time. It made me simultaneously proud to be British, and sad for what we have become, but hopeful that we can change.

James Rebanks combines the descriptive powers of a great novelist with the pragmatic wisdom of a farmer who has watched his world transformed. This is a profound and beautiful book about the land, and how we should live off it.

Through the eyes of James Rebanks as a grandson, son, and then father, we witness the tragic decline of traditional agriculture, and glimpse what we must now do to make it right again. As an evocation of British landscape past and present, it's up there with Cider With Rosie.

A beautiful and important book.

English Pastoral is a work of art. It is nourishing and grounding to read ... this brave and beautiful book will shape hearts and minds.

A wonderful, humane book told through the eyes of a man who has watched much vanish from his land, and now wants to put it back ... Moving and illuminating.

James Rebanks describes the life of a Lakeland working farmer from the inside with a unrivalled truth and eloquence

Vivid, accessible, inspiring - a story about one man's emerging land ethic, and an appreciation of the old ways in modern times. A vital book for anybody who eats

James Rebanks is a beautiful writer, in a unique position to describe the challenges currently being faced by farmers throughout the world. English Pastoral is a joy to read and extremely moving - a book which should be read by every citizen.

Farming, unlike almost any other job, is bound up in a series of complex ropes that Rebanks captures in his own story so beautifully: family pressure and loyalty, ego, loneliness, and a special kind of peer pressure...English Pastoral is going to be the most important book published about our countryside in decades, if not a generation

A deeply personal account by a farmer of what has happened to farming in Britain. Everyone interested in food should read this compelling, informative, moving book

Rebanks is a rare find indeed: a Lake District farmer whose family have worked the land for 600 years, with a passion to save the countryside and an elegant prose style to engage even the most urban reader. He's refreshingly realistic about how farmed and wild landscapes can coexist and technology can be tamed. A story for us all.

Moving, thought-provoking and beautifully written.

English Pastoral is one of the most captivating memoirs of recent years ...The traditional pastoral is about retreat into an imagined rural idyll, but this confronts very real environmental dilemmas. Like the best books, it gives you hope and new energy.

James Rebanks has a sharp eye and a lyrical heart. His book is devastating, charting the murderous and unsustainable revolution in modern farming ... But it is also uplifting: Rebanks is determined to hang on to his Herdwicks, to keep producing food, and to bring back the curlews and butterflies and the soil fertility to his beloved fields. Truly a significant book for our time.

Lyrical and illuminating ... will fascinate city-dwellers and country-lovers alike.

A lyrical account of Rebanks' childhood on the Lake District farm that he's made famous; an account of how he learned about stockmanship and community and the rhythms of the land from his father and grandfather. [...] His writing is properly Romantic, which is a high compliment [...] Rebanks is obviously a wonderful human as well as a splendid writer.

A lament for lost traditions, a celebration of a way of living and a reminder that nature is 'finite and breakable.' Mr. Rebanks hits all the right notes and deserves to be heard

The most important story, perfectly told

Memorable, urgent, eloquent ... Rebanks speaks with blunt, unmatched authority. He is also a fine writer with descriptive power and a gift for characterisation ... English Pastoral may be the most passionate ecological corrective since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring