Guardian's Best Fiction of 2022 'One of the most original and exciting writers working in English today' - Jhumpa Lahiri Once home to the country's most illustrious families, Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is now an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Forged in this frigid landscape, Ruthie learns how the town's prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history and how silence often masks a legacy of harm - from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends. In Very Cold People Sarah Manguso reveals the suffocating constraints of growing up in a very old, and very cold, small town. Here lies a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smouldering rage . . . 'Chilling . . . deeply impressive' - Guardian 'A masterclass in unease' - The Observer Longlisted for the Wingate Prize 2023

Poetry. 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 poems are accessible yet cryptic, and the voice is consistently spare, honest, understated and eccentric.

'I can't think of a writer who is at once so formally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso' - Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man No-one's there to watch her, so she just waits for the lights to turn on, waits to begin her performance. No-one is watching Ruth. She, however, watches everyone and everything, and waits, growing up on the outskirts of an affluent but threadbare New England township, on the outer edge of popularity. She doesn't necessarily understand what she is seeing, but she records faithfully and with absolute clarity the unfurling of her awkward youth, under even more awkward parenting. As they alternately mock, ignore, undermine and discount their daughter, Ruth's parents present now as damaged, now as inadequate, now as monstrous. All the while the Future comes towards them all, steadily, inexorably, for some of them fatally. And the fog of the Past and the abuses committed under it gathers, swirls, settles, intermittently clears. Watching the future come, the reader of Very Cold People is immobilized, transfixed as much by the gross failures of the adults to be adults, as by the determinedly graceful arc Ruth's trajectory makes towards an adulthood of her own making. Longlisted for the Wingate Prize 2023 Financial Times Best Debuts 2022

At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable autoimmune disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, depression, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace, "The Two Kinds of Decay "transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be.

Sarah Manguso is the author of two books of poetry, "Sist""e"" Viator" and "The Captain Lands in Paradise, "and the short story collection "Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape."" "In 2007 she was awared the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A "New York Times Book Review" Editors' ChoiceA "Time Out Chicago" Best Book Book of the YearA "San Francisco Chronicle "Best Book of the Year
"The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of deep space, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.
There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.
But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.
"
At twenty-one, just starting to comprehend all the traditional puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another unexpected challenge: a wildly unpredictable disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties--vanishing and then returning, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. Manguso recalls her nine-year struggle with Chronic Idiopathic Demyelinating Polyradiculoneuropathy, or CIDP, which disintegrates the myelin coating that protects the nervous system. She endured arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, depression, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace and self-awareness, "The Two Kinds of Decay" surpasses the expectations for a story about illness; Manguso trains the eyes anew on the notion of illness and survival. "In her second year of college, the poet Sarah Manguso developed a neurological disease so uncommon it doesn't even have a real name. The autoimmune condition, a rarer form of the already rare Guillain-Barre syndrome, is known as chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy, and it took more than four years to run its course . . . In her sharp, affecting new memoir, "The Two Kinds of Decay," Manguso writes from the far side of a long period of remission . . . From an original welter of experience, she has carefully culled details that remain vivid. Filtered through memory, events during her illness seem like 'heavenly bodies' that 'fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.' Manguso is acutely interested in these processes of renaming and remembering, the way time changes what we say about the past. Her book is not only about illness but also about the ways we use language to describe it and cope with it.As much as anything, this book is a search for adequate descriptions of things heretofore unnamed and unknown . . . Through her own attentiveness, Manguso has produced a remarkable, cleareyed account that turns horror into something humane and beautiful."--Emily Mitchell, "The New York Times Book Review" "In her second year of college, the poet Sarah Manguso developed a neurological disease so uncommon it doesn't even have a real name. The autoimmune condition, a rarer form of the already rare Guillain-Barre syndrome, is known as chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy, and it took more than four years to run its course. For several of them, Manguso had to undergo periodic treatments in which her plasma was completely removed and replaced. The treatments worked, but sometimes only for a few days. Later, she moved to steroid treatments, which restored a degree of physical well-being but created complicated side effects. In her sharp, affecting new memoir, "The Two Kinds of Decay," Manguso writes from the far side of a long period of remission. 'For seven years I tried not to remember much because there was too much to remember, ' she writes. From an original welter of experience, she has carefully culled details that remain vivid. Filtered through memory, events during her illness seem like 'heavenly bodies' that 'fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.' Manguso is acutely interested in these processes of renaming and remembering, the way time changes what we say about the past. Her book is not only about illness but also about the ways we use language to describe it and cope with it. The author of two books of poetry, Manguso brings the virtues of that form to the task of writing memoir. Her book is divided mostly into one- and two-page chapters titled like poems. She mixes high and low language, the crass and the scientific, with a lyric poet's sure-handedness. The chapters themselves--among them 'The Hematologist, ' 'The Forgetful Nurse, ' 'Corroboration'--resemble her own poetry, broken into aphoristic, discrete sections on the page. This disjointedness gives the prose a rhythm that mirrors the confusion and fragmentation of illness. It also clears space for one of the book's most remarkable aspects: its dark humor. What makes this account both bearable and moving is Manguso's keen sense of the absurdities that accompany severe illness. Often these come from its odd proximity to ordinary life . . . Manguso was already a writer when she became ill, and her obsession with words, their capacities and limitations, permeates her book. The world of hospitals and doctors has its own language, which she translates for the uninitiated reader. Her plasma replacement treatment is called 'apheresis, ' which she notes is 'from the Greek aphairein, to take away.' She is amused that hematologist-oncologists abbreviate their titles to '"hem-oncs" (pronounced almost like he-monks).' But her interest is more than literary curiosity. When she has a line implanted directly into her chest so her plasma can be replaced more easily, she parses her reaction: "I had read Freud in school. He distinguishes fear, a state of worrying anticipation . . . from fright, the momentary response of our mind to a danger that has caught us by surprise but is already over.' For hours, she writes, 'I lay there, weeping in fright. Not fear. Fright.' Manguso's desire for precision is urgent, even if it cannot always be fulfilled. 'I need to describe that feeling, ' she says of the deep cold induced by apheresis. 'Make a reader stop reading for a moment and think, Now I understand how cold it felt. But

"An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night," reported the July 24, 2008, edition of the "Riverdale Press." This man was named Harris, and "The Guardians"--written in the years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and ended his life--is Sarah Manguso's heartbreaking elegy.

Harris was a man who "played music, wrote software, wrote music, learned to drive, went to college, went to bed with girls." In "The Guardians," Manguso grieves not for family or for a lover, but for a best friend. With startling humor and candor, she paints a portrait of a friendship between a man and a woman--in all its unexpected detail--and shows that love and grief do not always take the shapes we expect them to.