300 Arguments

'Jam-packed with insights you'll want to both text to your friends and tattoo on your skin . . . A sweeping view of a human mind trying to make order of the world around us.' Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages. 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms, but the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement that steadily gathers power. Manguso’s arguments about writing, desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature. Lines you will underline, write in notebooks and read to the person sitting next to you, that will drift back into your mind as you try to get to sleep. '300 Arguments reads like you've jumped into someone's mind.' NPR

About the Author :
Sarah Manguso is the author of 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, The Two Kinds of Decay, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, Siste Viator, and The Captain Lands in Paradise. Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and her books have been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Her poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series, and her essays have appeared in in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review. She has taught graduate and undergraduate writing at institutions including Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Scripps College, and the University of Iowa. She lives in Los Angeles.

Review :
Jam-packed with insights you'll want to both text to your friends and tattoo on your skin . . . A sweeping view of a human mind trying to make order of the world around us. Every era has its wise aphorist. Sarah Manguso is ours and joins Marcus Aurelius, Thomas à Kempis, Montaigne. 300 Arguments shook me. It's dark, but the darkness comes from a refusal to look away. Its humor is wounded but present. Is it possibly a sort of novel? The writer says somewhere, 'This book is the good sentences from the novel I didn't write.' The idea holds up when applied, and the attentive reader will intuit an encompassing narrative. Sarah Manguso deserves many such readers. If there were a literary equivalent of the debate as to who is the best pound-for-pound boxer currently fighting, then word for word, Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments — weighing in at a mere ninety pages — would surely emerge as one of the smartest and most stimulating books of recent years. A new book by Sarah Manguso is always a cause for celebration. She is a poet-philosopher of the highest order who combines a laser-sharp intellect with a lyric gift and a capacious, generous heart. She is one of my favorite writers, and with 300 Arguments she deepens her inquiry into the very essence of what it is to be human. It's sometimes less important to know what we need to know than how we need to know it. 300 Arguments is an uncommon commonplace book of the everyday - a glittering reference book for life Reading Sarah Manguso is destroying me from the inside out. [300 Arguments] beckons the reader to return, to read a sentence, and put it down again. . . . Her arguments . . . are crystalline and often walloping. . . . There is ambition leaking out of every page The need for comfort through language is implicit – and sometimes explicit – in Manguso’s work. A good aphorism will comfort: you might want to stick it on the fridge – or in your memory. Although she claims to have no fondness for beginnings and endings, her fear of formlessness is apparent. Perhaps she seized on the aphorism as a form of elegant punctuation, a new way to stop time with the (in every sense) arresting line. Both books are written in protest at the void and in fear of insignificance. 300 Arguments is brilliant. One of my favourite books this year. Sarah Manguso is a miracle I love Sarah Manguso. Highly, highly recommended. Bracing, ferociously distilled. Sarah Manguso paints a mostly opaque, but at times penetratingly clear, self-portrait of a female writer at work. . . . The narrator's temper is mercurial; economical sentences range in tone from pithy and sardonic to tender and deeply empathetic. . . . But by the flip of a page, this wise and compassionate narrator descends into punchy one-liners that are darkly funny and sharper around the edges. Has your phone utterly destroyed your concentration span? This is the book for you. What at first seems like 300 unrelated aphorisms (“I notice a dangling modifier in a friend’s professional bio and don’t tell him. It is nothing less than sabotage”) grows into a universal world view, a profound philosophy and some very funny POVs with which to read aloud and torment your travelling companion. It may even inspire you to write your own.