Sarah Manguso – författare

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.''A chance to leave all adult frippery behind and ponder what''s really important - our children have known it all along. This book is cleansing, reassuring, funny, and frequently profound; I loved it''. Susie DentWhy 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 posted this question online, she immediately received hundreds of answers. 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, Do Dogs Have Chins? ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime - encompassing birth, death, love dinosaurs, and everything in between - to show us the wit and wisdom of children in all their wondrous glory.''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

“[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn’t realize we needed.” —The New YorkerIn 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

A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms from one of our greatest essayistsThere 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 ArgumentsA “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.

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.