'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 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 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. A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms from one of our greatest essayists.
