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...

1 A book describes works that the author has conceived but not brought into being 2 The world is drawn from memory There are missing countries, altered borders 3 Proust’s head is drawn on a page of In Search of Lost Time The words tracing out the contour of his face form a grammatically correct sentence 4 Man-sized aluminium mannequins are dropped at different heights from a crane Metamorphosed by folds, they adopt the pose to which they are constrained by their new morphology 5 An exhibit displays pieces unalike in spirit, style, and technique, but with the same origin: their author saw them while dreaming 6 Entomological boxes contain invitation cards to exhibitions that didn’t take place The reasons for their cancellation are written below the cards The boxes are hung on the walls like a collection of insects 7 A woman’s voice describes the shapes she sees in the static snow on the television screen after the end of broadcasts Geometric forms, windmills, ghosts The video is shown on a monitor posed on a low table at the foot of a divan couch The visitor lies down and compares what he sees to what he hears 8 Museum of Nobodies Instead of the usual celebrities, a wax museum displays unknown characters Chosen at random from the telephone book, the models are representative of neither an epoch, nor a region, nor a profession At its inauguration, the museum shows thirty statues Two new models are added to the museum’s collection each year: as the years go by, an evolving, sculptural, and hyperrealist memory of society emerges 9 Every year in January, a painting is made from memory of the same photograph, which represents a square in Bangkok during a time of affluence Neither the model image, nor the preceding paintings are looked at After ten years the paintings are revealed and exhibited alongside one another 10 A film scene is shown backwards to actors so they can learn to act it in reverse Once they succeed, they are filmed anew The new scene, in turn projected backwards,

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

Interview

May 2012

Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer

Jacques Testard

Interview

May 2012

Much has been written about the precocity and talent of Jonathan Safran Foer, whose debut novel Everything is Illuminated...

Art

July 2014

Operation Paperclip

Naomi Pearce

Patrick Goddard

Art

July 2014

‘I began at this point to feel that politics was not something “out there” but something “in here” and of...

poetry

Issue No. 3

Cousin Alice

Medbh McGuckian

poetry

Issue No. 3

Your mountain is robed in sombre rifle green And one of its greener fields is suddenly Black with rooks....

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required