Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape

Reviews

Manguso writes to the heart of a matter fiercely. Her book is full of aphoristic gut-checks. 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 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

With a careful, dry wit Manguso recounts minute scenes of quiet revelation, tragicomic devastation, and internal humiliation, with a deceptively lethargic sense of urgency.Graham, We Love You So