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

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 non-fiction writing, 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 desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature.

Has your phone utterly destroyed your concentration span? This is the book for you. What at first seems like 300 unrelated aphorisms ("I notice a dangling modifier in a friend's professional bio and don't tell him. It is nothing less than sabotage") grows into a universal world view, a profound philosophy and some very funny POVs with which to read aloud and torment your travelling companion. It may even inspire you to write your own.