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    300 Arguments
    300 Arguments
    300 Arguments
    Ebook54 pages30 minutes

    300 Arguments

    By Sarah Manguso

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateFeb 7, 2017
    ISBN9781555979591
    300 Arguments
    Author

    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.

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    Reviews for 300 Arguments

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      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!
    • 4/5
      A delightful read. A slow picture builds as you read these initially unconnected passages that's greater than the sum of its parts.
    • 3/5
      I love the concept behind this book and was enjoying the small bit I managed to read, but the formatting was so terrible, I had to stop reading it. Entire sections just disappear, and toying around with the font size alters your place in the reading. It's frustrating.
    • 3/5
      This manuscript is in terrible shape. Several of the aphorisms end suddenly in the middle of a sentence. Some are repeated, all or in part, later in the work. The listing on other sites seems to suggest the book is longer than the one I just read. I have no idea how much of the manuscript was there. Not the first book I’ve found at Scribd with textual problems of this sort.
    • 5/5
      I always find reading Sarah Manguso’s books fascinating. Her sparse words on the page are like what’s at the very heart of her words, her thoughts reduced down to the essence of her subject. Owing to my practice of using Post-its to mark the lines that impressed me the most, before copying them down in a notebook, I’m left with the best of the best of the best. As she says of the book, “Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages.” I find her writing quite moving and always intelligent. As with most unique writing styles, many book reviewers described this very special style using the usual reviewing terms, reducing the different to the normal. These reviews reduced this book to a random collection of aphorisms, or poetry, or an odd style of essay, but all those classifications miss the bigger picture. This book has an order (shall we say a “plot”) from the arrangement, interplay, and progression of her thoughts? The reader isn’t left to bounce from interesting thought to intriguing line, there’s more at work here. Because I felt something more was going on between the covers, I found myself reading and rereading 300 Arguments on the same day. Manguso is a middle-aged woman who’s reflecting on where she’s been in her life, and where she thinks she may be headed. Within the book, she’s remembering her family, pondering her life as a mother, describing her sexual actions and longings, and thinking where her writing is going. Basically, she’s doing some midlife scorekeeping, wondering just how she’s doing. After eight books of essays and poetry, her first novel Very Cold People comes out in 2022. She has won many different book awards, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and 300 Arguments was named a best book of the year by twenty different publications. She has taught writing at Princeton, Columbia, Pratt Institute, and is currently teaching at Antioch University. I personally “discovered” her in this summer’s issue of the Paris Review, and have been trying to make up for lost time ever since. I’ve read five of her books, with another on its way to me. Each book is very distinctive, clever, emotional, well done, and interesting—what more could you want from a writer? Once again, it’s obviously never too late to find something new.

    Book preview

    300 Arguments - Sarah Manguso

    300 ARGUMENTS

    Also by Sarah Manguso

    Ongoingness

    The Guardians

    The Two Kinds of Decay

    Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape

    Siste Viator

    The Captain Lands in Paradise

    300 ARGUMENTS

    SARAH MANGUSO

    Graywolf Press

    Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Manguso

    The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

    Parts of this book were previously published in slightly different forms in the Believer, the New York Ghost, the New York Times Book Review, the Paris Review, and Unsaid.

    This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

    Published by Graywolf Press

    250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

    Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

    All rights reserved.

    www.graywolfpress.org

    Published in the United States of America

    Printed in Canada

    ISBN 978-1-55597-764-1

    Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-959-1

    2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

    First Graywolf Printing, 2017

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2016937638

    Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

    300 ARGUMENTS

    A great photographer insists on writing poems. A brilliant essayist insists on writing novels. A singer with a voice like an angel insists on singing only her own, terrible songs. So when people tell me I should try to write this or that thing I don’t want to write, I know what they mean.

    You might as well start by confessing your greatest shame. Anything else would just be exposition.

    It can be worth forgoing marriage for sex, and it can be worth forgoing sex for marriage. It can be worth forgoing parenthood for work, and it can be worth forgoing work for parenthood. Every case is orthogonal to all the others. That’s the entire problem.

    I wrote my college application essay about playing in a piano competition, knowing I would lose to the kid who had played just before me. Even while I played knowing I would lose, I wrote, still I played to give the judges something to remember. I pretended my spasms of self-regard transcended the judges’ informed decisions about the pianists who were merely the best. I got into college.

    I assume the cadets are gay,

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