Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape
by Sarah Manguso
McSweeney's Books, 2007
Included in
One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box
with How the Water Feels to the Fishes
(Dave Eggers)
and Minor Robberies (Deb Olin Unferth).
Buy from mcsweeneys.net
Buy from amazon.com
Readings Book of the Year (Australia)
Though they have been accused of being prose poems (among other things), I call the pieces in this
collection stories to distinguish them from my two poetry collections,
which contain associative leaps that don't appear in this book. In this collection, the narrator
examines eighty-one almost invisibly transformative moments.
Sarah Manguso
Manguso writes to
the heart of a matter fiercely. Her book is full of aphoristic gut-checks. ...
Her stories sometimes read like journal entries or shards of an ongoing drama
to which the reader is only partially privy. There's a beguiling mystery to
this type of storytelling—what's missing takes on a palpable, sometimes
menacing presence.
John Freeman, BN.com
Done well, short
stories can work with the immediacy of haiku, which is what happens here. This
project makes us re-imagine how fiction moves us with its stories built less on
action than on inference.
David Ulin, Los Angeles Times Magazine
Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape is a risky, ruminative,
fiercely inward-dwelling volume. These eighty-one untitled single-paragraph
stories seem informed by the existential aloneness of the... overly imaginative
child. Such quick, beautiful, sad work!
Lisa Shea, Elle
Manguso condenses several dozen pages of Proust's thoughts on subjectivity and the weirdness of
waking into a paragraph about some guys named Nick and Mike. ... [Her]
collection is the kindest and most assured of the three.
Mark Edmund Doten, Bookslut
[Manguso] presents us with a series of mysterious, sometimes comically cranky speakers who convey
a novel's worth of romantic frustration in two hundred words.
Leigh Newman, Time Out New York
Manguso's book... skillfully reveals what it feels like to
be awkward in your own skin, fumbling toward identity in the land of grownups.
Marc Weingarten, San Francisco Magazine
The box may be small
and the stories compact (some are only a few dozen words long), but inside...
are poetic ruminations much grander than their modest size.
Stephen Dougherty, Boldtype
Flash fiction sometimes comes off as an experiment on the
reader, but these tales are thoughtfully plotted and character-driven.
Patrick Rapa, Philadelphia City Paper
A bizarre new concoction of literary mischievousness. Bent,
it seems, on breathing life back into short fiction.
Evan P. Schneider, Rocky Mountain Chronicle
This boxed set of short fiction leans less toward precious
and more toward captivating. ... Perfect as a gift for those
who love quirky, new-style fiction.
Lacey Galbraith, BookPage
This pint-sized collection features one hundred forty-five
very short stories from three of the finest writers of the genre... a tribute
to the five-hundred-word story.
Vanessa Brunner, 7 x 7
Each of the stories... begs to be torn from its binding, folded into a pocket or purse, and
carried around for future reflection.
Nate Martin, Stop Smiling Magazine
More than just a gimmick or formal exercise, One Hundred and Forty-Five succeeds at showing how
much depth can exist in the tiniest window of words.
Sean Gandert, Paste Magazine
