Published in 2020
256 pages
Kate Zambreno is the author of the novels Green Girl and O Fallen Angel. She is also the author of Heroines and Book of Mutter. A collection of talks and essays, The Appendix Project, and a collection of stories and other writing, Screen Tests, was published in 2019. She teaches at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.
What is this book about?
A restlessly brilliant novel of creative crisis and transformation
Beguiling and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue to her publisher, spending long days alone with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the novel’s narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rilke, 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 a dramatic step forward for one of our most daring writers.
