Kate Zambreno

A curious exploration of mortality, alienation, boredom, surveillance and how we regard ourselves among the animals. ‘Few human animals have Zambreno’s baleful honesty, insight, or relish for comedy, when they look at themselves’ Daisy Hildyard, author of Hunters in the Snow and Emergency 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 recognise 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 decipher our complex ‘zoo feelings’ – what we project, and what we refuse to see. 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. In writing that is inquisitive and inventive, Zambreno renders visible the enclosures we construct and those we occupy ourselves.

'Kate Zambreno’s Appendix Project and Book of Mutter are meditations on grief, motherhood, and memory alongside and through Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary. These are also books about reading and seeing. To enter them is to be in the company of a writer with a tremendous capacity and gift for questioning, thinking, and feeling. These are extraordinary works.' – Christina SharpeBook of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes—and dead calm—of grief. Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, it is an uncategorisable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. Zambreno weaves a complex web of associations, relics, and references, elevating the prosaic scrapbook into a strange and intimate postmortem/postmodern theatre.

'Kate Zambreno’s Appendix Project and Book of Mutter are meditations on grief, motherhood, and memory alongside and through Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary. These are also books about reading and seeing. To enter them is to be in the company of a writer with a tremendous capacity and gift for questioning, thinking, and feeling. These are extraordinary works.' – Christina SharpeInspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Kate Zambreno’s Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, Zambreno’s book on her mother that took her over a decade to write. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of her child’s life, contain Zambreno’s most original and dazzling thinking and writing to date. In *Appendix Project *Zambreno thinks through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

Kate Zambrenos Mutter kan sägas vara kongenial med den långa period den tog att skriva: under tretton års tid arbetade Zambreno med denna text, en långsam meditation över och ett grävande i arv, moderskap, minne och förlust. Runt dessa smärtpunkter kretsar texten, som blandar ett lyriskt tilltal med essä och prosa. Samtidigt är Mutter ett verk där skrivandets förutsättningar prövas: vad språket förmår att fånga av bleknade minnen och om det kan vara en metod för att komma fram till något slags försoning med sig själv och sin uppväxt. Mutter är ett försök att skriva mot tystnaden, för att på så sätt få den att tala, i ett bearbetande av sorgen som härrör från att aldrig riktigt ha vetat vem ens mamma egentligen var. Med en lätthet tar Zambreno läsaren genom detta sökande i mörkret, efter en identitet att hålla fast vid.

'I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order - pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature'On the last day of December 2009 Kate Zambreno, then an unpublished writer, began a blog arising from her obsession with literary modernism. Widely shared on social media, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants and melancholy portraits of the fates of the modernist 'wives and mistresses,' reclaiming the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, her blog helped create a community of writers and devised a new feminist discourse of writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic she began online into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it - she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles feminine experience to the realm of the 'minor,' and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. 'ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological,' writes Zambreno. 'When he does, it's existential.'With Heroines, Zambreno provided a model for a newly subjectivized criticism, prefiguring many group biographies and forms of autotheory and hybrid memoirs that were to come in the years to follow.

'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 'The Light Room is both a gift and a beacon' Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations'Kate Zambreno has performed a miracle, capturing real, lived time from within the exhaustion of pandemic-era parenthood. The Light Room reminded me of that fundamental magic of writing - that the details of another person's life, so precisely and honestly rendered, can instantly loosen the edges of your own life and make you feel less alone' Jenny Odell, bestselling author of How to Do NothingIn The Light Room, Zambreno offers her most profound and affecting work yet: a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public health, climate change, and the future we can expect for our children. Moving through the seasons, returning often to parks and green spaces, Zambreno captures the isolation and exhaustion of being home with a baby and a small child, but also small and transcendent moments of beauty and joy. Inspired by writers and artists ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, Yuko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world.How will our memories, and our children's, be affected by this time of profound disconnection? What does it mean to bring new life, and new work, into this moment of precarity and crisis? In The Light Room, Kate Zambreno offers a vision of how to live in ways that move away from disenchantment, and toward light and possibility.

A manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a generation of writers and scholars, reissued after more than a decade. "I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order--pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature."--from Heroines On the last day of December 2009 Kate Zambreno, then an unpublished writer, began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with literary modernism and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her partner held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants and melancholy portraits of the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses," reclaiming the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community of writers and devised a new feminist discourse of writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon. In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it--she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles feminine experience to the realm of the "minor," and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. "ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential." With Heroines, Zambreno provided a model for a newly subjectivized criticism, prefiguring many group biographies and forms of autotheory and hybrid memoirs that were to come in the years to follow. A book that has become its own canon, Heroines was named one of the "50 Books that define the past 5 Years in Literature" by Flavorwire, an "Essential Feminist Manifesto" by Dazed, and one of the "50 Greatest Books by Women" in Buzzfeed.

Tone is a collaborative study of literary tone, a notoriously challenging and slippery topic for criticism. Both granular and global, infusing a text with feeling, tone is so difficult to pin down that responses to it often take the vague form of “I know it when I see it.”In Tone, a cooperative authorial voice under the name of the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere begins from the premise that tone is relational, belonging to shared experience rather than a single author, and should be approached through a communal practice. In partnership, the Committee explores the atmospheres emanating from texts by Nella Larsen, W. G. Sebald, Heike Geissler, Hiroko Oyamada, Mieko Kanai, Bhanu Kapil, Franz Kafka, Renee Gladman, and others, attending to the chafing of political irritation, the hunger of precarious and temporary work, and the lonely delights of urban and suburban walks.This study treats a variety of questions: How is tone filtered through translation? Can a text hold the feelings that pass between humans and animals? What can attention to literary tone reveal about shared spaces such as factories, universities, and streets and the clashes and connections that happen there? Searching and conversational, Tone seeks immersion in literary affect to convey the experience of reading—and living—together.

Tone is a collaborative study of literary tone, a notoriously challenging and slippery topic for criticism. Both granular and global, infusing a text with feeling, tone is so difficult to pin down that responses to it often take the vague form of “I know it when I see it.”In Tone, a cooperative authorial voice under the name of the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere begins from the premise that tone is relational, belonging to shared experience rather than a single author, and should be approached through a communal practice. In partnership, the Committee explores the atmospheres emanating from texts by Nella Larsen, W. G. Sebald, Heike Geissler, Hiroko Oyamada, Mieko Kanai, Bhanu Kapil, Franz Kafka, Renee Gladman, and others, attending to the chafing of political irritation, the hunger of precarious and temporary work, and the lonely delights of urban and suburban walks.This study treats a variety of questions: How is tone filtered through translation? Can a text hold the feelings that pass between humans and animals? What can attention to literary tone reveal about shared spaces such as factories, universities, and streets and the clashes and connections that happen there? Searching and conversational, Tone seeks immersion in literary affect to convey the experience of reading—and living—together.

"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 From "one of our most formally ambitious writers" (Esquire), a moving account of caretaking in a time of uncertainty and loss In The Light Room, Zambreno offers her most profound and affecting work yet: a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public health, climate change, and the future we can expect for our children. Moving through the seasons, returning often to parks and green spaces, Zambreno captures the isolation and exhaustion of being home with a baby and a small child, but also small and transcendent moments of beauty and joy. Inspired by writers and artists ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, Yūko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world. How will our memories, and our children's, be affected by this time of profound disconnection? What does it mean to bring new life, and new work, into this moment of precarity and crisis? In The Light Room, Kate Zambreno offers a vision of how to live in ways that move away from disenchantment, and toward light and possibility.

As seen in The Paris Review, The Art Newspaper, and Whitehot Magazine The most comprehensive survey of the celebrated Dutch artist Michael Raedecker’s work spanning his 30-year career Michael Raedecker, the acclaimed Dutch artist, records the memories held within spaces and objects in his enigmatic and dream-like paintings. Suburban homes, tree houses, and empty rooms and vacant chairs, all float in haunting isolation. Muted hues are penetrated with thread and needle where the artist hand-sews forms into textural materiality. Since the beginning of his career as a painter, Raedecker has incorporated embroidery into his works as a visual counterpoint to his washed-out paint application. This survey of his work, designed by the acclaimed Dutch graphic designer, Irma Boom, is the most comprehensive published to date, featuring essays by a unique and diverse group of critics, curators, artists, and academics.

For the first time in English, literary icon Marguerite Duras's foundational masterpiece about a young woman's existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside. The Easy Life is the story of Francine Veyrenattes, a twenty-five-year-old woman who already feels like life is passing her by. After witnessing a series of tragedies on her family farm, she alternates between intense grief and staggering boredom as she discovers a curious detachment in herself, an inability to navigate the world as others do. Hoping to be cleansed of whatever ails her, she travels to the coast to visit the sea. But there she finds herself unraveling, uncertain of what is inside her. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand by day while psychologically dissolving in her hotel room by night, she soon reaches the peak of her inner crisis and must grapple with whether and how she can take hold of her own existence. An extraordinary examination of a young woman's estrangement from the world that only Marguerite Duras could have written, The Easy Life is a work of unsettling beauty and insight, and a bold, spellbinding journey into the depths of the human heart.

'One of the 20th century's greatest thinkers and prose stylists' New York Times'A novel of the disquieting contours of family, and of the mind, and of life unceasing even in the midst of death by one of the most important, visionary writers of all time' Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy WITH A FOREWORD BY KATE ZAMBRENOThere’s nothing to do about boredom, I’m bored, but one day I won’t be bored anymore. Soon I’ll know that it’s not even worth the trouble. We’ll have the easy life.Twenty-five-year-old Francine Veyrenattes, confined to the family farm, already feels that life is passing her by. But after Francine lets slip a terrible secret, culminating in the violent deaths of her brother and uncle, her world is shattered.Fleeing the farm for the seaside, Francine finds herself disintegrating. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand, she restlessly wishes for things to be somehow easier, to have a life worth living.But then the calm and quiet is broken yet again – by another tragedy and a senseless death, in which Francine finds herself implicated. Cast out of paradise, and stranded between her home and the rest of the world, she must confront her rapidly dissolving sense of self if she is to find a way to survive.'It’s a masterpiece, and a little known, if not unknown, masterpiece … Any serious reader of this author’s work must begin with this novel' YVES BERGER

Berättarjaget i Drift har svårt att fokusera. Deadline för romanen som hon redan fått pengar för har passerat, men skrivandet går trögt. Istället ägnar hon alltmer tid åt att promenera i grannskapet tillsammans med sin nervösa terrier. Hon fotograferar människor och djur, skriver till vänner och författarkollegor, antecknar och tänker. Hon försjunker i en dialog med poeten Rainer Maria Rilke och läser biografi efter biografi över honom och andra författare och konstnärer. En idé om att skriva i radikalt presens, att fånga själva tiden medan den pågår, gör henne besatt. Så sker någonting som kommer att förändra allt. Drift är en berättelse om konstnärliga ambitioner, personlig kris och litteraturens möjligheter och misslyckanden. Om tid, skisser och drifter.