Kate Zambreno

'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...

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...

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...

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...

To Write As If Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno's failed attempts to write a study of Hervé Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. In this diaristic, transgressive work, the first in a cycle written in the years preceding his death, Guibert documents with speed and intensity his diagnosis and disintegration from AIDS and elegizes a...