Booksmith is thrilled to host a virtual event with 300 Arguments author Sarah Manguso to celebrate her debut novel Very Cold People. She'll be in conversation with Heidi Julavits (The Vanishers, The Folded Clock). Join us!

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

You can order copies of the authors' books below: 

• Order copies of Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso here; here for Sarah's other books.
• Order Heidi Julavits' books here.

We'll ship directly to you or hold for pickup at our San Francisco shop. We are happy to fulfill orders anywhere in the world – international postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact [email protected].

About the book

For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. 

Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families—the Cabots, the Lowells: the “first, best people”—by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. 

Forged in this frigid landscape Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that regularly buries nearly everything in Waitsfield. 

As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town’s prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm—from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive. 

In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. At once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage, Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers.

About the authors

Sarah Manguso is the author of eight books. Her previous book, 300 Arguments, a genre-defying work of aphoristic nonfiction, was named a best book of the year by more than twenty publications. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. Her work is regularly featured across The New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, and The New Yorker, among others. She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles. Very Cold People is her first novel. Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

Heidi Julavits is the author of four novels and one book of nonfiction. A co-founder of The Believer Magazine, she edited the book Women in Clothes with Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton. She teaches at Columbia University and seems to be writing only nonfiction these days, most recently pieces in the NYTimes Magazine and The New Yorker, about avalanches and volcanic eruptions, respectively. Next she’ll be writing about magnetic north. Her upcoming book of nonfiction, scheduled for 2023, may or may not be told in the second person.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.