Sarah Manguso

Reading this was sort of like eating a bag of skittles. If I ate the bag all at once it might be tasty and delicious, but all the flavours would become muddled together, indistinct. As it was, I found I had to eat a few at a time, in order to perceive the different themes. This is a collection of pithy aphorisms and mostly brief abstractions about the world and the place the author occupies in it, as (I gathered) a writer, teacher, mother, sick person, among others. The quotation on the back flap says it all: "think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages." I defy any reader not to feel envious of some of these deep pockets of wisdom (and to speculate on the long book of which they may be the most quotable bits), tossed off almost as afterthoughts. I defy you also to pick up the disparate, wispy threads of narrative that bind these thoughts together. Every so often I thought I had it... but maybe not.… (meer)