Sarah Manguso

The Guardians opens with a story from the July 24, 2008, edition of the Riverdale Press that begins, "An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the station on West 254th Street." Sarah Manguso writes: "The train's engineer told the police that the man was alone and that he jumped. The police officers pulled the body from the track and found no identification. The train's 425 passengers...

"For Ruthie, the frozen, snow-padded town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. But this is no picturesque New England. Once "home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God," by the 1980s it is an unforgiving place, awash with secrets. Very Cold People tells Ruthie's story, through her eyes: from the shame handed down through her Italian and Jewish immigrant forebears and indomitable...

The author traces the documentation of her own life in diaries over twenty-five years, exploring the struggle to find clarity in life. "In her third book that continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay, Sarah Manguso 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...

A seemingly unrelated group of aphorisms combine to reveal an arrangement that gathers power as the author presents arguments about desire, ambition, and failure.