300 Arguments
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Description
“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 ArgumentsA “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.
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Published Reviews
Publisher's Weekly Review
Manguso (Ongoingness) continues her fragmentary approach to autobiography with this inventive book of aphorisms and memories. All of life's great subjects are here-love, relationships, happiness, desire, and vulnerability on the personal side; effort, luck, envy, and success vs. failure on the professional side-in one- and two-sentence nuggets of compressed insight. Many of the sayings sound like updated versions of traditional proverbs ("Inner beauty can fade, too" and "Choose one: chronic disappointment or lowering your expectations"); their authoritativeness contrasts with the author's professed uncertainty about how she's doing as a wife, mother, and writer. Parallel constructions, contradictions, and mathematical propositions ("It takes x hours to write a book") come closest to the title's connotation of rhetorical arguments. Arguably, pretentiousness sometimes masquerades as profundity here, and, like a comedy set composed entirely of one-liners, the book contains almost too much to take in at once. The pithy format tricks readers into skimming quickly, but it will require multiple rereadings to absorb the book's rewarding wisdom. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Book Review
A writer's life, solitary and complex, broken apartnot into shards but puzzle pieces.In Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015), poet and essayist Manguso assessed her life as a writer and mother with the greatest economy of means. In her latest, she goes a step further. "Think of this as a short book, she advises, rather late in the book, composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages." At first glance, it seems like a collection of off-kilter Thoughts for the Day. There are pithy aphorisms: "Inner beauty can fade, too"; dark, reflective thoughts: Preferable to accepting ones insignificance is imagining the others hate you; purely personal confessions of sexual despair: There are people I wanted so much before I had them that the entire experience of having them was grief for my old hunger. These seemingly random and casual assertions subtly form a kind of loose story, that of a writer, academic, and mother at midlife wondering how the win-loss record might add upand on which side this particular book might fall. Ive written whole books to avoid writing other books, she confesses at one point, suggesting a failure of ambition. Some pages later she seems to feel at a loss: I wish someone would tell me what I should be doing instead of this, that hed be right, and that Id believe him. Self-doubt becomes part of a larger, more evocative struggleto keep going, keep writing, and leave evidence of having lived: On the page, these might look like the stones of a ruin, strewn by time and weather, but I was here. A slim, poetic self-portrait that opens up as you read it and stays in the mind. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Manguso (Ongoingness) continues her fragmentary approach to autobiography with this inventive book of aphorisms and memories. All of life's great subjects are here—love, relationships, happiness, desire, and vulnerability on the personal side; effort, luck, envy, and success vs. failure on the professional side—in one- and two-sentence nuggets of compressed insight. Many of the sayings sound like updated versions of traditional proverbs ("Inner beauty can fade, too" and "Choose one: chronic disappointment or lowering your expectations"); their authoritativeness contrasts with the author's professed uncertainty about how she's doing as a wife, mother, and writer. Parallel constructions, contradictions, and mathematical propositions ("It takes x hours to write a book") come closest to the title's connotation of rhetorical arguments. Arguably, pretentiousness sometimes masquerades as profundity here, and, like a comedy set composed entirely of one-liners, the book contains almost too much to take in at once. The pithy format tricks readers into skimming quickly, but it will require multiple rereadings to absorb the book's rewarding wisdom. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit. (Feb.) Copyright 2016 Publisher Weekly.
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Citations
Manguso, S. (2017). 300 Arguments . Graywolf Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)Manguso, Sarah. 2017. 300 Arguments. Graywolf Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities (Notes and Bibliography) Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)Manguso, Sarah. 300 Arguments Graywolf Press, 2017.
Harvard Citation (style guide)Manguso, S. (2017). 300 arguments. Graywolf Press.
MLA Citation, 9th Edition (style guide)Manguso, Sarah. 300 Arguments Graywolf Press, 2017.
Copy Details
Collection | Owned | Available | Number of Holds |
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Libby | 1 | 1 | 0 |