"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
There will come a time when people decide you've had enough of your
grief, and they'll try to take it away from you.*
Bad art is from no one to no one.
Am I happy? Damned if I know, but give me a few minutes and I'll tell
you whether you are.
Thank heaven I don't have my friends' problems. But sometimes I notice
an expression on one of their faces that I recognize as secret
gratitude.
I read sad stories to inoculate myself against grief. I watch action
movies to identify with the quick-witted heroes. Both the same fantasy:
I'll escape the worst of it.
--from 300 Arguments
A "Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis" (Kirkus Reviews),
Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To
read her work is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service
of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight.
300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction
writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms. But, as in
the work of David Markson, the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful
arrangement that steadily gathers power. Manguso's arguments about
desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental,
and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom
literature.
