kate zambreno
Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts; To Write As if Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert; The Light Room; and a collaborative study on tone in literature with Sofia Samatar. They live in Brooklyn with their two children and their partner, John Vincler. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, they are a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU.
“Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup.”—Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
“One of our most prolific and curious minds.”—Vulture
titles by Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno
From a writer who has “invented a new form” (Annie Ernaux), an exploration of mortality, alienation, boredom, surveillance, and how we regard ourselves among the animals.
Animal Stories begins with Kate Zambreno’s visit to the monkey house at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where one stark tree “seems to be the stage design for a simian production of Waiting for Godot.” But who are the players and who is the audience, and can they recognize each other?
What follows is a series of reports from the deep strangeness of the zoo, a space that is “more often than not deeply sad, an odd choice for regular pilgrimages of fun.” Amid these excursions with their young children, Zambreno turns to Garry Winogrand’s photographs and John Berger’s writings on animals, reshaping the spectator as the subject to decode our complex “zoo feelings”—what we project, and what we refuse to see. Then, in “My Kafka System,” which dovetails with these zoo studies, Zambreno thinks through the notebooks and animal stories of a writer known for playing at the threshold between species, continuing their investigation into the false divide between human and animal.
Drawing on forms including reports, essays, journals, and stories, Zambreno renders visible the enclosures we construct and the ones we occupy ourselves.
Kate Zambreno
From “one of our most formally ambitious writers” (Esquire), a moving account of art and caretaking in our precarious present.
The Light Room takes place over the course of cloistered seasons, between the rooms of an apartment and a city’s green spaces, amid the exhaustion and isolation of caring for a baby and a small child. In search of relief from a moment both monotonous and profoundly uncertain, Zambreno engages a lineage of other writers and artists who have made art from a daily practice—from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, Yūko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz.
What does it mean to bring new life, and new work, into this world of precarity and crisis? How are our memories, and our children’s, affected by our profound disconnection? Zambreno’s most poetic, tender, and philosophical work yet, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world.