Sarah Manguso
“Life is beautiful because, thanks to death, it is finite—every doughnut might be your last doughnut. That potential lastness casts a shimmer of appreciation and longing onto every experience.”
Sarah Manguso
(c) Beowulf Sheehan
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“A furious, propulsive meditation on wifehood, motherhood and artistic ambition.”
“This eviscerating new novel falls somewhere between “Marriage Story” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Manguso offers a feverish recounting of two New York artists (the wife is a successful writer, while the husband is still finding his medium) as their once-happy union corrodes.”
“Very Cold People knocked me to my knees. So precise, so austere, so elegant, this story is devastatingly familiar to those of us who know the loneliness of growing up in a place of extreme emotional restraint.”
“Though dealing with life’s ugly, messy truths, her writing is compact and beautiful. So masterly is Manguso at making beauty of boring old daily pain. . . [the book is] a compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived. . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.”
“[Manguso] belongs to a cohort of minimalist, stream-of-consciousness writers—Jenny Offill, Sheila Heti, Eula Biss—whose texts work out the equations of domestic life and creative ambition.”
“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. ”
“If Twitter is an undifferentiated stream of thought, a chyron of consciousnesses almost (but never quite) as witty as it is useless, Manguso’s book is the very opposite of this: refined, deliberate, carved out of silence as opposed to shouted into wind. To frame it in terms of ‘brevity’ is to do it an immense disservice. … This book is no more “short” than Pascal’s Pensees, or—for that matter—Montaigne’s Essays. That it is able to cut more immediately to the quick is testament to its amplitude.”
Sarah Manguso is the author of ten books, most recently Liars (Hogarth, 2024), which the New York Times called, “eviscerating.” Her other books include the novelVery Cold People (Hogarth, 2022), 300 Arguments (Graywolf, 2017), an NPR Best Book of 2017; Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (Graywolf, 2015), a New York Times Editor’s Choice; The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend (FSG, 2012), a Salon Top Ten Book of 2012; The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir (FSG, 2009), a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year; Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (McSweeney’s 2007), a Los Angeles Times Critics' Choice; and the poetry collections Siste Viator (Four Way, 2006), and The Captain Lands in Paradise (Alice James, 2002), a Village Voice book of the year. A master of the unconventional in multiple genres, Kirkus Review praised Manguso as "a Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis.”
In discussing form and structure in 300 Arguments with Vela, Manguso notes, "I think some of my best work comes from looking at something so small in size or duration or emotional register you can barely see it. It’s not what people would call plot-driven. I’ve never really been interested in plot, reading it or writing it. And I have a terrible time following plots too, which can be deeply frustrating. But I’ve come to realize that I’m not the only person with this problem."
Manguso’s work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize, and her books have been translated into five languages. Her poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in several editions of the Best American Poetry series, and her essays have appeared in Harper's, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review. Educated at Harvard and the Iowa Writers Workshop, she lives in Los Angeles and currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at New England College.
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