A Spare and Unsparing Look at Affliction and Recovery that Heralds a Stunning New Voice

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...

"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...

A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms from one of our greatest essayists

There will come a time when people decide you've had enough of your grief, and they'll try to take it away from you.

Bad art is from no one to no one.

Am I happy? Damned if I know, but give me a few minutes and I'll tell you whether you are.

Thank heaven I don't have my friends' problems. But sometimes I notice an expression on one of their faces that I recognize as secret gratitude.

I read sad...