300 Arguments
09 August 2018Synopsis
'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
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09 August 2018
9781509883332Reviews
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
