300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso

Don’t worry about defining Manguso’s latest work. Graywolf (2017), the publisher of Manguso’s seventh book, describes the book as a “foray into the frontier of contemporary non-fiction.” Broken into three hundred pieces—sometimes sentences, sometimes a paragraph—each part of this book builds on another, often in unexpected and surprising ways, often several pages after the reader has last considered the idea that Manguso broached. There’s a narrative structure here that any reader will feel, even if not articulate it, and subjects such as desire, happiness, failure, and dread are tackled with a range from serious playfulness to existential dread. This is a book you will need, and want, to read more than once to fully appreciate. —Michael Nye