Very Cold People

Very Cold People
Sarah Manguso
RRP:
NZ$ 47.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 39.35
Hardback
h216 x 135mm - 208pg
28 Apr 2022 UK
International import eta 10-19 days
9781529055283
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order

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9780593241240 US Paperback $29.59

' 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, watching all the hard becoming, the reader of Very Cold People is immobilized unawares, 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.
Sarah Manguso is one of the most original and exciting writers working in English today. Every word feels necessary, and she' s redefining genre as she goes -- Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies Very Cold People knocked me to my knees. So precise, so austere, so elegant, this story is devastatingly familiar to those of us who know the loneliness of growing up in a place of extreme emotional restraint. Manguso is one of my favourite writers, and this book is a revelation -- Lauren Groff, author of Florida A haunted masterpiece, written with the precision of a miniaturist and the vulnerability of true heartache. I wept more than once; I recognized myself more than once. Very Cold People proves yet again that Manguso is one of the greats -- Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less I loved every sentence, thought, and gesture in this perfect novel. Sarah Manguso has painted a deeply moving portrait of the stark unreality of childhood -- Catherine Lacey, author of Pew A poignant and unnerving masterwork about growing up in a dominator society, told with the concision, carefulness, and sense of mystery that we' ve come to expect from Sarah Manguso -- Tao Lin, author of Leave Society Stark and tremendous . . . I don' t think I' ve ever read a more clear-eyed account of the child' s matter-of-fact acceptance of adult cruelty. Very Cold People is a precise portrait of the inverted world of damage, a place where the solid objects, the chairs and tables and pencils and puddles, are all mysteriously ghosted by feeling, while the people walk around with the dead-cold solidity of objects. It' s both beautiful and unsettling. I loved it and am still trying to accommodate its cold quality - like swallowing an ice-cube by accident. Manguso' steady gaze and clarity of expression is reminiscent of Louise Gluck. I hope it will do as brilliantly as it deserves. -- Laura Beatty, author of Pollard The first novel by acclaimed poet and critic Sarah Manguso is a bracing coming-of-age story and master class in controlled style. The unnamed narrator recalls growing up in Massachusetts on poverty' s edge. Her father is snappish and distant; her mother' s quick to judge and deeply narcissistic. As the story moves into the narrator' s teen years, the damage to her self-esteem begins to show . . . Manguso is a lovely writer about unlovely things . . . here she depicts her protagonist' s quiet agony with a poet' s eye . . . A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful. * Kirkus, (starred review) *
Sarah Manguso is the author of 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, The Two Kinds of Decay, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, Siste Viator, and The Captain Lands in Paradise. Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and her books have been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Her poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series, and her essays have appeared in in Harper' s, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review. She has taught graduate and undergraduate writing at institutions including Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Scripps College, and the University of Iowa. She lives in Los Angeles.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781529055283
Published: 28 Apr 2022
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Picador
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Format: Hardback
Height: 216mm
Width: 135mm
Pages: 208

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