Overview

""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.

Full Product Details

9781639737833

Table of Contents

Reviews

""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."" --Krys Malcolm Belc, author of THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD

""Osmundson writes with the disarming voice of that teacher who makes science cool, even radical. His thought is discursive, his questioning accretive. He contains and covers multitudes."" --John Okrent, New York Times Book Review ""[Virology] is queer pedagogy at its best: non-patronizing, thoroughly smart, and full of urgent and caring knowledge that beckons us to get closer again with caution and passion."" --Judith Butler

Author Information

Joseph Osmundson is a professor of microbiology at New York University and the author of Virology. His work has been published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS and in the New York Times, the Atlantic, TIME, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives and works in New York City.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available