"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, Refinery29
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, 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.
