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
Every era has its wise aphorist. Sarah Manguso is ours and joins Marcus Aurelius, Thomas à Kempis, Montaigne. -- Edmund White
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. -- John Jeremiah Sullivan
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. -- Geoff Dyer
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. -- Dani Shapiro
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 -- Joanna Walsh, author of Break.Up
Reading Sarah Manguso is destroying me from the inside out. -- Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
[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 * New Republic *
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. * Observer *
300 Arguments is brilliant. One of my favourite books this year. -- Irenosen Okojie, author of Speak Gigantular
Sarah Manguso is a miracle -- Kaveh Akbar, Calling A Wolf A Wolf
I love Sarah Manguso. -- Lauren Groff
Highly, highly recommended. Bracing, ferociously distilled. -- Laura Van den Berg
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. * Hazlitt *
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. * Emerald Street *