300 Arguments

By Sarah Manguso

'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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Aug 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781509883332

Sarah Manguso

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.

Reviews for 300 Arguments

[detailmuse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages.This collection of ~300 thoughts (most are a sentence or two, some are short paragraphs) evokes some interesting philosophy. Manguso’s persona is somewhere between the wholesome creativity of the late Amy Krouse Rosenthal and the darker, discomfiting quirkiness of Miranda July (both of whose work I enjoy). I marked a couple dozen favorite “arguments” and had a tough time limiting them to five to post here:It isn’t so much that geniuses make it look easy; it’s that they make it look fast.The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember.Among those with less, I try to distract them from the imbalance. Doing so feels like theft. Among those with more, I try to distract them from the imbalance. Doing so feels like charity.The smallest and shortest pieces of art strive for perfection; the largest and longest strive for greatness.It’s impossible to fail if one doesn’t know how the end should look. And it’s impossible to succeed. But it’s possible to enjoy.More than just a collection of quotes, it gives a glimpse into the author’s writing and romantic life. But it never really gathers into a narrative, which left me a little unsatisfied ... and then brought that last quote to mind :) and I did enjoy it!

[andrlik · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A delightful read. A slow picture builds as you read these initially unconnected passages that's greater than the sum of its parts.