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Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts (Riverhead) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert (Columbia University Press). Forthcoming in Summer 2023 from Riverhead is The Light Room, a meditation on art and care, as well as Tone, a collaboration with Sofia Samatar, from Columbia University Press in early 2024. ‘Insekt’ is part of an in-progress work of fiction, Realisms. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

Articles Available Online


Insekt or large verminous thing

Fiction

September 2022

Kate Zambreno

Fiction

September 2022

Around dusk one evening in March, I went out back to the small garage, and switched on my small square of artificial light at...

Feature

January 2018

Accumulations (Appendix F)

Kate Zambreno

Feature

January 2018

I’ve been keeping a mental list of all the pieces of art that I’ve nursed Leo in front of...

Biography | Cattolicissimo trio composed of mother father beloved son God, why doesn’t the English language have an equivalent for –issimo?   Incidental beginnings: the mother (1951) broke off from her Milanese family in the early Seventies, got married rashly and in absence of her parents, by religious rite, for the sake of controversy, asking a cousin to be her best man She has been living in Rome with her husband ‘in exile’, as if in a colony, as if in Africa Nicola’s father (1948) was raised by a single mother, and lived with her in the council estate where they shot Una Giornata Particolare with Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren   Nico’s first eight years of life: he lives with his father, mother and paternal grandmother   The father had attended seminary Then studied architecture Fatti di Valle Giulia (the Italian equivalent of May 1968 in France): the father does not partake, because of his cousin – who he is not really in touch with – who is a Carabiniere On the matter, Nicola quotes from a Pasolini poem, which is also often quoted by his father (remember to ask which one)   The father leaves university Joins the Navy for his compulsory military service   He goes back to uni with a newfound interest in ships and submarines, which will affect his creative production via the dissemination of portholes everywhere in his projects, even on the dividing walls between two rooms, which is unpalatable to the Berengo family, as well as slanted perspectives and sequences of rooms with no connecting corridors   He is a solitary youth; he spends his life putting The Way of a Pilgrim into practice, repeating to himself over and over (when he is angered by the endless queue at the post office; when his mother’s dinner is yet again tasteless; when he inadvertently tears up the wrong drawing) Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me   Despite his marriage he keeps his boyish good looks He becomes morbidly enamoured with his son He doesn’t want him to become sophisticated During a catechism lesson when Nico is eight years old, his father taps into his own reference material,

Contributor

August 2014

Kate Zambreno

Contributor

August 2014

Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts (Riverhead) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study...

Heroines

feature

March 2013

Kate Zambreno

feature

March 2013

I am beginning to realise that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like...

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fiction

March 2011

In the Field

Jesse Loncraine

fiction

March 2011

There were flickers of red in the water, a tint the colour of blood. He stood in the river,...

feature

August 2013

The Ghosts of Place

Dylan Trigg

feature

August 2013

 ‘So I turned around for an instant to look at what my field of vision onto the sea had...

feature

February 2012

Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

Rose McLaren

feature

February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer...

 

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