An eviscerating (The New York Times) novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us all--from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Los Angeles Times, Town & Country, Lit Hub, Chicago Public Library

Is divorce the new marriage plot? . . . [Liars] pulses with a rare kind of anger, making it a compulsive, unforgettable read. Love stories, it seems, are out. Divorce as liberation? Very much in.--Vogue

A tour de force . . . Liars makes an old story fresh.--NPR

A bracing story of a woman on the verge.--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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 joys and labors 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.

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.

Pondering the questions only kids would think to ask, this hilarious, poignant collection captures the wonder of a child's imagination, brought to life by beloved New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck.

This book is for anyone who has secret questions in their mind they are too embarrassed to ask out loud. In other words, this book is for everyone.--Lemony Snicket, bestselling author of A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions

Why does a ghost wander? Are bubbles in drinks their thoughts? Do dogs have chins? Where does the dark go when the light comes on? How will it feel on the last day I'm a child?

What's the best question a kid ever asked you? When Sarah Manguso opened a Twitter account and posted this single (and only) tweet, she immediately received hundreds of answers. Many, she discovered, were intelligent, intuitive, inventive, and philosophical. For Manguso, these responses seemed to form a choral philosophy that she believes disappears from most people's lives in kindergarten. As she says in her illuminating foreword, These questions are cute by the word's original definition, swift and piercing. They cut to the quick.

Gathering more than one hundred of the best questions from this poll and bringing them brilliantly to life with illustrations by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck, Questions Without Answers ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime--encompassing birth, death, poop, dinosaurs, and everything in between--to show us the wit and wisdom of little people in all their wondrous glory.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE - The masterly debut novel from an exquisitely astute writer (The Boston Globe), about growing up in--and out of--the suffocating constraints of small-town America.

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD - Compact and beautiful . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.--The New York Times

Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend.--The New Yorker

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping

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.

Manguso has produced a remarkable, clear-eyed account that turns horror into something humane and beautiful.--The New York Times Book Review

A book of tremendous grace and self-awareness, Sarah Manguso's The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be.

The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of deep space, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.

There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.

But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.

At twenty-one, just starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, vanishing and then returning, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her nine-year struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, depression, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness.

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.

An eviscerating (The New York Times) novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us all--from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Los Angeles Times, Town & Country, Lit Hub, Chicago Public Library

Is divorce the new marriage plot? . . . [Liars] pulses with a rare kind of anger, making it a compulsive, unforgettable read. Love stories, it seems, are out. Divorce as liberation? Very much in.--Vogue

A tour de force . . . Liars makes an old story fresh.--NPR

A bracing story of a woman on the verge.--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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 joys and labors 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.

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.

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 Guardians opens with a story from the July 24, 2008, edition of the Riverdale Press that begins, An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the station on West 254th Street.

Sarah Manguso writes: The train's engineer told the police that the man was alone and that he jumped. The police officers pulled the body from the track and found no identification. The train's 425 passengers were transferred to another train and delayed about twenty minutes.

The Guardians is an elegy for Manguso's friend Harris, two years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and jumped under that train. The narrative contemplates with unrelenting clarity their crowded postcollege apartment, Manguso's fellowship year in Rome, Harris's death and the year that followed--the year of mourning and the year of Manguso's marriage. As Harris is revealed both to the reader and to the narrator, the book becomes a monument to their intimacy and inability to express their love to each other properly, and to the reverberating effects of Harris's presence in and absence from Manguso's life. There is grief in the book but also humor, as Manguso marvels at the unexpected details that constitute a friendship.

The Guardians explores the insufficiency of explanation and the necessity of the imagination in making sense of anything.

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.

This book is for those of us who want to read more poetry but are frequently stopped by its--what is it? Its chilly self-seriousness? Its unwillingness to hold our hand every so often, while cracking an easy joke? Either way, Sarah Manguso, like her spiritual siblings David Berman and Tony Hoagland, is a friendly kind of savior and guide. Her writing is gorgeous and cerebral (imagine Anne Carson) but she doesn't skimp on the wit (imagine Anne Carson's ne'er-do-well niece). Poetry-fearers, don't back away from this beautiful book; these might be the pages that bring you back into the form. --Dave Eggers