Sarah Manguso

"For Ruthie, the frozen, snow-padded town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. But this is no picturesque New England. Once "home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God," by the 1980s it is an unforgiving place, awash with secrets. Very Cold People tells Ruthie's story, through her eyes: from the shame handed down through her Italian and Jewish immigrant forebears and indomitable mother, to the violences and silences endured by each of her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to get out of--and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive"--

A Novel

Very Cold People

“[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn’t realize we needed.” —The New Yorker In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay. In it, she confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,” she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now eight hundred thousand words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary—it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us. “Bold, elegant, and honest . . . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict’s testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy.” —The Paris Review “Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to life . . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

The End of a Diary

Ongoingness

A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms from one of our greatest essayists 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.

300 Arguments

Traces the author's struggles with a mysterious illness she contracted at the age of twenty-one, a nine-year journey during which she lost weeks of her life during each recurrence and endured painful cycles of addiction, depression, and treatments. By the author of Hard to Admit.

A Memoir

The Two Kinds of Decay

A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all, from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments. A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway. When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joy and labor of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife. As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her. Combining the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and the pithy wisdom of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.

Liars

an elegy

The guardians

Dave Eggers

Deb Olin Unferth

Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, How the Water Feels to the Fishes, and Minor Robberies

One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box

The eagerly awaited debut novel from “one of the most original and exciting writers working in English today” (Jhumpa Lahiri): a masterwork on growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of small-town America. ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Oprah Daily, Good Housekeeping, The Week, The Millions, Lit Hub “My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway.” For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families—the Cabots, the Lowells: the “first, best people”—by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that regularly buries nearly everything in Waitsfield. As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town’s prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm—from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive. In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. At once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage, Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers.

Il salto

Gente muy fría

Jules Renard

Throughout his journal, Renard develops not only his artistic convictions but also his humanity as he reflects on the nineteenth-century French literary and art scene, and on the emergence of his position as an important novelist and playwright in that world. Through a mix of aphorisms and observations, short scenes, gossip, jokes, and meditations on life and art, Renard portrays the details of his personal life—his love interests, his position as a socialist mayor of Chitry, the suicide of his father—that often appear in his work. In recent years, the fragmented memoir has grown in popularity, and there’s been a resurgence of diary as an artistic form. Once again, Jean Paul Sartre’s assessment that “directly, or indirectly, Renard is at the origin of contemporary literature” rings true. In a new introduction, Sarah Manguso—whose groundbreaking nonfiction incorporates elements of diary and aphorism—both contextualizes and celebrates Renard’s seminal journal.

The Journal of Jules Renard

poems

Siste viator

A collection of the short-short fiction form.

Minor Robberies

Jordan Davis

Poetry. This anthology of not-yet household names, edited by Jordan Davis and Sarah Manguso, features work by Max Winter, Michael Savitz, Jeni Olin, Amy Lingafelter, Tanya Larkin, Jennifer Knox, Cole Heinowitz, Tim Griffin, Johannes Goransson, Greta Goetz, Alan Gilbert, Tonya Foster, Katie Degentesh, Del Ray Cross, Chris O. Cook, Carson Cistulli, Jim Behrle, and B.J. Atwood-Fukuda. "What excites me about these poets is that, beside their talent, they are all blessed with the terrible freedom of not yet having published books. I take special joy in reading work by these poets who, while already setting their new stars into the poetical firmament, are not mired in the stability-enforcing, niche-assigning public consciousness"--Sarah Manguso.

American Poets Before Their First Books

Free Radicals

Sarah Manguso’s first collection, a combination of verse and prose poems, explores love, nostalgia, remorse, and the joyful and mysterious preparation for the discoveries of new lands, selves, and ideas. The voice is consistently spare, honest, understated, and eccentric.

The Captain Lands in Paradise

At 21, Manguso was faced with a wildly unpredictable disease that appeared suddenly, paralyzing her for weeks at a time. In this captivating story, she recalls her nine-year struggle with arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, addiction, and depression.

Sarah Manguso

About

Books

Join the club