“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 Arguments A “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. “This collection transcends any category to be something totally its own. . . . Manguso's captured the argumentative voice of a mindsifting through a problem, circling it, animated by sorting it out. . . . If this is poetry, it's the poems of quarrel. And if it's nonfiction, it's not the nonfiction of fact. Instead, it's the nonfiction which maps us to our own thinking. We enter Manguso's mind - her puzzle,pleased to be puzzled, too.” ―NPR “All Things Considered” “[ 300 Arguments ] reads like you've jumped into someone's mind.” ―NPR “Weekend Edition” “ 300 Arguments is a delectation, a book whose great precision and honesty constitute an irresistible incitement to think.” ― San Francisco Chronicle “[ 300 Arguments is] inimitably Manguso, but, suddenly, wonderfully, universally, ours.” ― Washington Independent Review of Books “This tiny gem of a book is jam-packed with insights you’ll want to both text to your friends and tattoo on your skin. It’s an intimate portrait of a woman at work, and a sweeping view of a human mind trying to make order of the world around us.” ― Omnivoracious “[Manguso’s arguments] are pithy and wry, with a melancholy undercurrent that takes a beat to set in―like a vaccine whose pinch gives rise to a muscular ache.” ― The Nation “Sarah Manguso paints a mostly opaque, but at times penetratingly clear, self-portrait of a female writer at work. . . . The narrator’stemper is mercurial; economical sentences range in tone from pithy and sardonic to tender and deeply empathetic. . . . But by theflip of a page, this wise and compassionate narrator descends into punchy one-liners that are darkly funny and sharper around theedges.” ― Hazlitt “ 300 Arguments is the book of aphorisms that I’ve been waiting for: trenchant, witty, and sometimes absurd. . . . Perhaps that’s whyI’m so drawn to it: each nugget of wisdom is something I’m tempted to share on social media or email to a friend. Sometimesbrevity is exactly what we need to make sense of the complicated world we live in.” ―Michele Filgate, Literary Hub “Perspective-altering. . . . The accumulation of these entries has a certain difficult-to-deny power. . . . I wanted to gift it to everyone Iknow, read it aloud to strangers on the bus, and transcribe it by hand in its entirety like a holy text.” ―Joshua James Amberson, Portland Mercury “Manguso’s prose is as succinct and revelatory as ever in this collection of aphorisms that quickly gathers momentum, becoming the self-portrait of a writer whose wisdom leaves one dazzled.” ―Booksmith recommendation, San Francisco Chronicle “[ 300 Arguments ] beckons the reader to return, to read a sentence, and put it down again. . . . Her arguments . . . are crystallineand often walloping. . . . There is ambition leaking out of every page.” ― New Republic “Manguso resuscitates the aphorism from its descent into maxim, bringing it back as a spur to thought. . . . Manguso’s unsettlingarguments deliver the world back to the reader at 300 different, jarring angles.” ― Literary Hub “Manguso’s experience of life, in the little prose sachets that open and blossom page by page, are fragrant with undisclosed potentials. . . . Cosmos bloom and fold back up again, such that the work’s insights pulse line by line, and begin to hum. . . . The inherent volition of one epigram glides you into the next, transports you. . . . The Arguments has that rarer bird among the specimens: poignancy.” ― Third Coast Review “