“Drifts is a dazzling and enjoyable book. Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup. I've never read truer pages on the subject of pregnancy. No writer has come so close to achieving a total grasp of life: the entanglement of everyday things, a writing project, and a pregnant body, in a single work.” —Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Paris Review, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Vulture, and Refinery29
“Reading all Zambreno feels like the jolt one gets from a surprise cut or burn in the kitchen, that sudden recognition that you’re in a body and the body can be hurt.” —Alicia Kennedy, Refinery29Haunting and compulsively readable,
Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances—the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment—leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything.
A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature,
Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.
An "intimate, fiercely intelligent, and reliably provocative" (Refinery 29) novel of creative obsession by the influential, innovative author of Green Girl and Heroines
"Zambreno has been putting out smart, underrecognized novels for a decade," wrote Vulture in naming Drifts one of their Best Books of 2020. "She ought to be Rachel Cusk'd."
Haunting and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rilke, Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances-the comings and goings of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment-leaves her unsettled…until an intense and tender disruption changes everything.
A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.
Story Locale: New York City; Europe
137269356
