300 Arguments
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher 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
Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages.
300 Arguments 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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
