'This small-sized book has immense power. Marvel at the clarity and fire.' Zadie Smith 'Jam-packed with insights you'll want to both text to your friends and tattoo on your skin' Celeste Ng A combined book of two daring works by Sarah Manguso, presented together in a rare reversible single edition. 300 ARGUMENTS Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages. 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso 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 writing, desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature. Lines you will underline, write in notebooks and read to the person sitting next to you, that will drift back into your mind as you try to get to sleep. '300 Arguments reads like you've jumped into someone's mind.' NPR ONGOINGNESS: THE END OF THE DIARY 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.

Breast cancer shocked her into asking how she would cope. What resources of body and mind had she inherited from her parents? 'Self-Portrait with Parents' combines original research with a personal understanding of Tyerman's upbringing and its consequences. Looking back at her adolescence and exploring the largely unknown lives of her parents has helped her not only to recover from recurrent breast cancer but also to resist the powerfully negative reactions still common today. Tyerman's father, Donald, Oxford scholar from the impoverished north-east, wartime Fleet Street hero and BBC broadcaster, deputy editor of 'The Times' and editor of the 'Economist', endured high responsibility without real power. Her mother, Margaret Gray, gave up several careers to look after five children and a husband disabled by childhood polio. Tyerman grew up with a father who couldn't walk. Yet his passion was athletics. Her parents were indifferent to gender distinctions while the outside world valued Fifties femininity. This was hard for Tyerman then but now liberates her to resist assumptions about a loss of womanhood and sexuality.