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| Kate Zambreno |
Kate Zambreno
“ I am more interested in the fragment, the notes, what is ongoing or continuing... To write about what is ephemeral, the daily, and to use it to attempt to think through the crisis of the self and what is beyond the self.”
“The body is so often left out of the question of writing ”
Kate Zambreno’s most recent book is the novel Drifts (Riverhead Books, 2020), which Publisher’s Weekly called “immersive and exciting.” It was named a most anticipated book by Entertainment Weekly, Refinery 29, Esquire, LitHub, Salon, The Millions, and Dazed. Her other books include Screen Tests (Harper Perennial, 2019), a collection of shorts and essays, that was named a best book of the year by the editors of the Paris Review, Nylon, Domino, Bustle, Book Riot, Buzzfeed, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and was reviewed in The Baffler, the New Yorker, Art in America, Frieze, and The New Republic,. Other nonfiction works include Appendix Project (Semiotext(e), 2019) a series of talks on grief, art and the project of literature that was written as a shadow project to her book on grief and the mother, Book of Mutter (Semiotext(e), 2017), given at Duke, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and at Washington University as the first Hurst Artist as Critic. 2019. Other novels include O Fallen Angel (Harper Perennial, 2017), and Green Girl (Harper Perennial, 2014). Forthcoming is a monograph on Hervé Guibert for Columbia University Press. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, VQR, and elsewhere. Zambreno also writes regularly for art catalogs and her work has been widely anthologized.
In a conversation with Sarah Manguso in The Paris Review about writing postpartum, Zambreno commented on the body and its relation to writing: “The body is so often left out of the question of writing. I needed to be a writer after I gave birth—I needed to think and have a vehicle or container in which to think. I felt like Dürer’s Melencolia I in the weeks after, on the bed, in the dark, the baby on top of me, surrounded by my notebooks and Roland Barthes’s The Neutral, reading about exhaustion as a feature of the neutral. Maybe I also felt ornery—everyone was telling me that becoming a mother would take away that existential drive to make work—but it was the opposite. I have never felt more full of life and death, and it made me become reborn as a writer, through the joy, and the suffering.”
She teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Brooklyn.
“Intricate and finely tuned . . . There’s an improvisatory quality to the text, like a wet-painted brushstroke. . . . brilliantly evokes a hazy state of self-isolation.”
“A free-spirited, essayistic novel exploring the complex links among art, parenthood, and making a living. . . . The charm of this novel is how it makes this deep uncertainty feel palpable and affecting. [The result is] a lyrical, fragmentary, and heartfelt story about the beauty and difficulty of artistic isolation.”
“In Screen Tests, a voice who both is and is not the author picks up a thread and follows it wherever it leads, leaping from one thread to another without quite letting go, creating a delicate and ephemeral and wonderful portrait of how a particular mind functions. Call them stories (after Lydia Davis), reports (after Gerald Murnane), or screen tests (inventing a new genre altogether like Antoine Volodine). These are marvelously fugitive pieces, carefully composed while giving the impression of being effortless, with a quite lovely Calvino-esque lightness, that are a joy to try to keep up with.”
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