Mailing List


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...

Good People opens in Berlin in 1938 Thomas Heiselberg has grand plans to make the company he works for the biggest market-research group in Europe Meanwhile, in Leningrad, Sasha Weissberg has plans of her own, inspired by the intellectual conversations in her parents’ literary salon When war breaks out and fate brings Sasha and Thomas together, they will both be brought to account Published to rapturous reviews in more than ten languages, Good People is a tour de force: sparkling, erudite, a glimpse into the abyss Its young author, Nir Baram, has been compared to Dostoyevsky and Grossman, and has won several awards in Israel, including the Prime Minister’s Award for Hebrew Literature   In this extract, we find 22-year-old Sasha working as a literary editor of confessions for the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, under Stepan Kristoforovich, whom everyone calls Styopa At the end-of-year department celebrations Sasha’s husband, Maxim Podolsky, mimics Styopa in a skit written by political prisoners Sasha wants Styopa to give her details of the whereabouts of her missing younger twin brothers, Vlada and Kolya, who were taken away when their parents were arrested, but Styopa pulls her aside to let her know that he is about to be arrested himself In a last act of devotion to his favourite colleague, Styopa assures Sasha that she will be untouched by the disaster about to befall him – and tells her the location of one of her brothers — J G   *     The band started playing jolly music, and the head of the first department came over the loudspeakers ‘Dear comrades, you are all invited to the dance floor’   ‘My health has improved a lot, and I look forward to getting back to work But soon I’m going to want to speak with you’ She was surprised by her defiant tone   Did he understand the equation that had come clear to her on the train? Enough time has passed Without progress in the matter of the twins, I can’t go on working here, and, for my part, you can execute me She was stricken with anguish: maybe she had wasted too much time,

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...

READ NEXT

feature

Issue No. 2

Three Poets and the World

Caleb Klaces

feature

Issue No. 2

In 1925, aged 20, the Hungarian poet Attila József was expelled from the University of Szeged for a radical...

feature

February 2011

Old media, new year: China’s CCTV woos the nation’s netizens

Shepherd Laughlin

feature

February 2011

The CCTV New Year’s gala broadcast, known in Mandarin as Chunwan, is probably the most massive media event you’ve...

feature

July 2012

Run, Comrades, #YOLO! — Cursory Notes on Radical Hashtag Forms

Huw Lemmey

feature

July 2012

I’m not up on the Internet, but I hear that is a democratic possibility. People can connect with each...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required