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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...

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE PONDERS LOVE   Honey protocols, hear how they mock, snow white and super blue: On the footpaths, we are told, radiators grapple with hydrants and at the marble quarry puss licks her belly until the shag is fluffed Get well cards addressed to third parties The cable car’s driving crank whirrs Here dwells Friedrich Nietzsche On ukulele, recording his propaedeutics in song Huzza, a subcutaneous Alpine ditty Dissimilarity as a religious doctrine The root chord: E minor Robert Walser says Friedrich Nietzsche was not Huh? What? What was I not? You were not loved Hence your resentment The vengeful perfidy of one unloved Meanwhile, new arrivals tuck in to hearty snacks Sausage Berries Poire Williams and Gentian Friedrich Nietzsche and the mild master of remorse converse on stacking chairs Are they onions? Are those contacts – or blows with the fan? Is it a hand-forged bark spud, swathed in camellia oil? We don’t know They speak quietly The mountains’ endless murmur Friedrich Nietzsche ponders love Robert Walser smiles in silence     THE ARBITER’S SICK   Honey protocols, hear how they mock I’m still asleep, they’re fighting already My assistants are whacking each other with hangers and brushes Oh boy, the arbiter’s sick today I see how they batter their limbs, whose workforce is mine, in order, thus squandered, to own themselves at long last Or so the assistants think How wrong they are! Whizz bang, the ankle joint, the nose bone Cat’s tongue, mop and deerfoot OMG Who’ll sew this for me? Who’ll stitch it up? Who’ll fetch and bring back, who’ll support, who’ll transcribe? What do mops and moping have to do with each other? Check it for me! Enough of the fisticuffs! When do we go to print? Assistants, get to work! The theme is: The arbiter’s sick today Let’s go! Mixed dactyls, skipping rhythms, inner universe of middle rhyme Bear me forth and write it all down Realise me in places where I cannot set foot And, while conciliation soon prevails, it’s still lying there, the cuddly toy of my tattooed assistant, who always was my favourite Ah! I’ll never sack a single one     TRANSLATION   Honey protocols, hear how they mock, you translated yourself – didn’t you? – into everything You translated your chemisettes, your crumbs, right on into The Great Glory, where they vanished instead

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

December 2011

Travel

Paul Kavanagh

fiction

December 2011

Taxi The taxi stopped and Henry climbed into the taxi. The taxi driver went around the block three times...

Prize Entry

Issue No. 17

Grace

Sophie Mackintosh

Prize Entry

Issue No. 17

14. It comes for me in the middle of the day when I am preparing lunch, quartering a tomato...

fiction

September 2013

Seiobo There Below

László Krasznahorkai

TR. Ottilie Mulzet

fiction

September 2013

1 KAMO-HUNTER Everything around it moves, as if just this one time and one time only, as if the...

 

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