Sarah Manguso Livres

The most extraordinary memoir about illness and grief since Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.

“[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

Featuring the whimsical inquiries of children, this collection showcases the imaginative and often humorous perspectives they hold. Through the artistry of Liana Finck, a celebrated New Yorker cartoonist, the book brings to life the poignant and curious thoughts that reflect the wonder of childhood.

A combined book of Ongoingness and 300 Arguments, two daring works by Sarah Manguso, presented together in a rare reversible single edition.

A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms from one of our greatest essayists.

An “eviscerating” novel about the complexities of being a wife, mother, and artist, exploring how marriage can transform us into liars. This compelling narrative has been recognized as a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and shortlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, earning accolades as a best book of the year from various outlets. The story questions whether divorce has become the new marriage plot, capturing a rare kind of anger that makes it a gripping read. The protagonist, Jane, an aspiring writer, enters a relationship with filmmaker John Bridges, both seeking love, success, and happiness. Initially, Jane believes she has found everything she desires, including the joys of motherhood. However, she soon realizes that she is overshadowed by John's ambitions and ego, ultimately becoming defined by her role as a wife. As Jane's career begins to thrive, their marriage deteriorates, leading to a pivotal moment when John leaves her. This novel is a powerful exploration of a woman's struggle against the confines of family life and her journey toward self-discovery, told with wit and intensity as she rises from the ashes of her crumbling marriage.

Acclaimed writer Sarah Manguso makes her fiction debut with an icy, furious novel about the way in which a society can ignore and enable the abuse of young women, narrated by the daughter of just such an abusive mother.