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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...

I awoke bathed in perspiration, my teeth clenched Once again, as on countless previous nights, I had been hunted from pillar to post in a dream – shot at, tortured, scalped But on this night, of all nights, the thought occurred to me that I might not be the only one among thousands upon thousands to be condemned to such dreams by the dictatorship   Charlotte Beradt, ‘Dreams under Dictatorship’, Free World (1943)   Born in Berlin in 1907 into a Jewish merchant family, Charlotte Beradt was working as a journalist when the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933 Around this time, she began collecting dreams, slowly compiling a record of the ramifications of Nazi ideology on the unconscious minds of her local community, from doctors and civil servants to students and homemakers Over the course of 6 years, Beradt collected accounts of around 300 individuals’ dreams, a project which ended in 1939 when she fled Germany for the USA   I was reminded of Beradt’s extraordinary project whilst exploring Daria Martin’s Tonight the World, a multi-media installation made in response to a dream diary kept by Martin’s grandmother Susi Stiassni, currently on view at the Barbican Curve Gallery The family, prominent Jewish textile manufacturers, fled their home in Brno in 1938, when Czechoslovakia was on the brink of Nazi occupation Aged only 16 when they left the country, Stiassni went on to keep a dream diary for around 35 years, accumulating some 20,000 pages of material Hers is an acutely personal project: almost too private to engage with as an outsider, and impossibly monumental to comprehend as a whole   Martin’s Tonight the World opens with a videogame that simulates the Stiassni family home in Brno, a modernist villa which still stands today Watching the prerecorded play-through, we are granted a first-person perspective on a faithfully recreated 3D model of the house and garden In the course of the game, the player discovers several artefacts from Martin’s grandmother’s childhood, among them a toy soldier, a locket and a model robot As the player interacts with these objects, specific pages from the

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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Prize Entry

April 2017

/gosha rubchinskiy/

Christopher Burkham

Prize Entry

April 2017

1. APARTMENT INTERIOR/MORNING/BELYAYEVO, MOCKBA, ROSSIJSKAJA FEDERACIJA…   There is a T-shirt on the desk in front of him.  ...

fiction

April 2013

Towards White, 1975

Scott Morris

fiction

April 2013

In the morning, the square was white. Voula’s hair was white. A pigeon on a bronze horse shifted, sent...

fiction

January 2014

To Kill a Dog

Samanta Schweblin

TR. Brendan Lanctot

fiction

January 2014

The Mole says: name, and I answer. I waited for him at the indicated location and he picked me...

 

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