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Spawning Season

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What to expect

"Osmundson’s 2022 essay collection Virology established the NYU professor as a voice of his generation…In Spawning Season, Osmundson looks at queer parenthood and the natural world" -Boston Globe

“A singular and deeply moving book. Osmundson has birthed a profound meditation on family and food, longing and loss, hope and grief, humans and salmon. In his story, we find a multitude of beautiful, complicated ways of imagining the future—and then working to build one.” –Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winner and New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World

From the author of National Book Critics Circle Award and Lambda Literary Award finalist VIROLOGY comes an intimate chronicle of queer family-making.

Since grade school, Joseph Osmundson dreamed of being pregnant. As he grew into the queer scientist he is today, the economic precarity of academia and the warming planet led to his decision not to reproduce. That is, until a lesbian couple he had known since college came to him with a proposition: would Joe be a bio-dad and would he co-parent alongside them?

Soon everything was falling into place. But when the two partners communicated their need for a child to reflect their own racial backgrounds, Joe’s whiteness exposed fault lines in their parenting journey. Spawning Season is a genre-bending memoir that treats the scientific as integral to the personal and that builds an entire species of the grief we carry in our bodies. In exploratory prose that builds on the work of Donna Haraway and José Esteban Muñoz, Osmundson considers the ethics of child-rearing in the 21st century, the brutal wonder of caregiving, and the joys and intricacies of building family beyond biology.

Critics Review

What a singular and deeply moving book. In Spawning Season, Joseph Osmundson has birthed a profound meditation on family and food, longing and loss, hope and grief, humans and salmon. In his story, we find a multitude of beautiful, complicated ways of imagining the future—and then working to build one.
Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of NYTimes bestseller AN IMMENSE WORLD
With Spawning Season, Joseph Osmundson offers us an intimate look at the way queer theory becomes written on the body and moves through the world. Spawning Season is a book that only a queer scientist could write, and a powerful exploration of the relationships between queer men and queer women, between white queers and queers of color. A powerful rejoinder to old notions about fatherhood, emotion, and masculinity, Spawning Season is a reminder that queer theory calls on us to not just transform society but also ourselves.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of THE DISORDERED COSMOS
Beautiful nature writing, beautiful food writing, and above all, intimate, revealing, and heart-wrenching writing about complicated and deeply human longing for queer parenthood, and about the risk and loss inherent in putting our faith in reproductive futurity.
author of THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD
Beautiful and deeply moving. Joseph Osmundson guides us through a topography where pleasure, kinship, gender, and procreative longing take new forms, and challenges us to expand the limits of human expression. He shows us queerness as the ultimate nurturing force, a place where cooking becomes an affirmation of chosen family, an act of love on a colossal scale.
John Birdsall, James Beard Award-winning author of THE MAN WHO ATE TOO MUCH and WHAT IS QUEER FOOD?
An aching and imaginative memoir about the many ways to have and lose a child. In Spawning Season, Joseph Osmundson unearths the confluence of his dream of becoming a queer parent alongside the odyssey of a spawning salmon. The grief that unspools in both stories will resonate with anyone who has wanted a child amid the threats of climate change and capitalism. Yet Osmundson also conjures new possibilities for the ways we nurture and nourish each other, and as such, has written a book brimming with as much hope as exists in the single glowing orb of a salmon egg.
Sabrina Imbler, author of HOW FAR THE LIGHT REACHES
Good god, this book. A thunderclap of emotion. I am rearranged. Osmundson's best work of nonfiction yet.
Lulu Miller, author of WHY FISH DON'T EXIST
I am a Joseph Osmundson stan, and I have no idea how Osmundson made Spawning Season. It is delicate, probing, surprisingly fun, and geniusly patient when I most needed to believe books could save parts of us. Parenting stories do not look, end or begin as we believe, and Osmundson will have you stomping for joy at acceptance of our shared paradox.
Kiese Laymon, author of HEAVY
Osmundson’s 2022 essay collection Virology established the NYU professor as a voice of his generation…In Spawning Season, Osmundson looks at queer parenthood and the natural world.
Boston Globe
Author Joseph Osmundson
Narrator Joseph Osmundson
Duration 5 hours and 45 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781639737857
Format Audiobook
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Genre Memoirs
Availability AU, GB, IE, US

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