Happy paperback pub day to Sarah Manguso’s VERY COLD PEOPLE, published by Hogarth. The masterly debut novel about growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of small-town America was selected as a best book of the year by The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and Good Housekeeping The New York Times called it “compact and beautiful” and The New Yorker compared it to My Brilliant Friend. “Though dealing with life’s ugly, messy truths, her writing is compact and beautiful. So masterly is Manguso at making beauty of boring old daily pain. . . [the book is] a compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived. . . . This novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.”—The New York Times “Reading Manguso is like watching someone skin an animal, slice its throat and drain its blood, preparing it quickly and efficiently for consumption. You wonder, reading her succinct and devastating sentences, just what she had to do to get there.”—Los Angeles Times “[Manguso] belongs to a cohort of minimalist, stream-of-consciousness writers—Jenny Offill, Sheila Heti, Eula Biss—whose texts work out the equations of domestic life and creative ambition.”—New Yorker “A searing catalogue of pinched bitterness . . . But with her gemlike apercus, Manguso renders this bleakness oddly fascinating.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine “A chilling first novel . . . This coming-of-age story offers a stark take on what it is to feel poor, poorly nurtured, and inadequately loved in a class-conscious, lily-white town....Very Cold People does what we ask of good literature: It absorbs our attention and stirs empathy and reflection.”—NPR “In this carefully constructed novel, the pervasive cold is as human as it is meteorological. Manguso is an exquisitely astute writer.”—Boston Globe #sarahmanguso #verycoldpeople #paperbackpub #debut #pubday