Drifts
Kate Zambreno
(Author)
Description
"Drifts is a dazzling and enjoyable book. Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup. I've never read truer pages on the subject of pregnancy. No writer has come so close to achieving a total grasp of life: the entanglement of everyday things, a writing project, and a pregnant body, in a single work." --Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Named a Best Book of the Year by The Paris Review, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Vulture, and Refinery29"Reading all Zambreno feels like the jolt one gets from a surprise cut or burn in the kitchen, that sudden recognition that you're in a body and the body can be hurt." --Alicia Kennedy, Refinery29 Haunting and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances--the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment--leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything. A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.
Product Details
Price
$26.00
Publisher
Riverhead Books
Publish Date
May 19, 2020
Pages
336
Dimensions
5.7 X 8.3 X 1.3 inches | 1.01 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780593087213
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About the Author
Kate Zambreno is the author of several acclaimed books including Screen Tests, Heroines, and Green Girl. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, she teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
Reviews
Advance praise for Drifts "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." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Immersive [and] exciting . . . a captivating deconstruction of the writer's process that will reward readers in search for meaning."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Zambreno is perceptive, funny, and spellbinding as she reflects on and dramatizes the infinite complexities of womanhood and creativity." --Booklist "Drifts gathers up multiple ways of seeing, feeling and understanding, layering fiction, meditation, biography, confession and prose poetry into one capacious structure. This is an extraordinary book."
--Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland
"In Drifts, Kate Zambreno has taken nothing for granted. She has created a spirited, shape-shifting read that is by turns insightful, intimate, speculative, and mischievous. In her search to uncover the form's rich potential, Zambreno is unafraid to show us what she too is made of."
--Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond
"Kate Zambreno's writing is mysterious, unclassifiable, and yet intimate and familiar too. Reading her is like looking through a kaleidoscope--the world is at once more beautiful and more terrifying."
--Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart
"Ravishingly intense and tender[, ] an intimate portrait of the mind of a writer on the verge of disappearing. . . . The message she sends back to us from edge of the abyss is that literature is discourse: a delirious, charged conversation propelled across time and space by desire, lust, confusion, despair and yearning. Utterly original, transfixing, infectious. . . . I couldn't put it down."
--Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of Call Me Zebra
"Zambreno is perceptive, funny, and spellbinding as she reflects on and dramatizes the infinite complexities of womanhood and creativity." --Booklist "Drifts gathers up multiple ways of seeing, feeling and understanding, layering fiction, meditation, biography, confession and prose poetry into one capacious structure. This is an extraordinary book."
--Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland
"In Drifts, Kate Zambreno has taken nothing for granted. She has created a spirited, shape-shifting read that is by turns insightful, intimate, speculative, and mischievous. In her search to uncover the form's rich potential, Zambreno is unafraid to show us what she too is made of."
--Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond
"Kate Zambreno's writing is mysterious, unclassifiable, and yet intimate and familiar too. Reading her is like looking through a kaleidoscope--the world is at once more beautiful and more terrifying."
--Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart
"Ravishingly intense and tender[, ] an intimate portrait of the mind of a writer on the verge of disappearing. . . . The message she sends back to us from edge of the abyss is that literature is discourse: a delirious, charged conversation propelled across time and space by desire, lust, confusion, despair and yearning. Utterly original, transfixing, infectious. . . . I couldn't put it down."
--Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of Call Me Zebra
