Book to Watch in 2019: The Millions, Nylon, Domino, Bustle, Book
Riot, Buzzfeed, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
A new work equal parts observational micro-fiction and cultural
criticism reflecting on the dailiness of life as a woman and writer, on
fame and failure, aging and art, from the acclaimed author of
Heroines, Green Girl, and O Fallen Angel.
In the first half of Kate Zambreno's astoundingly original collection
Screen Tests, the narrator regales us with incisive and witty swatches
from a life lived inside a brilliant mind, meditating on aging and
vanity, fame and failure, writing and writers, along with portraits of
everyone from Susan Sontag to Amal Clooney, Maurice Blanchot to Louise
Brooks. The series of essays that follow, on figures central to
Zambreno's thinking, including Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and
Barbara Loden, are manifestoes about art, that ingeniously intersect and
chime with the stories that came before them.
"If Thomas Bernhard's and Fleur Jaeggy's work had a charming, slightly
misanthropic baby--with Diane Arbus as nanny--it would be Screen
Tests. Kate Zambreno turns her precise and meditative pen toward a
series of short fictions that are anything but small. The result is a
very funny, utterly original look at cultural figures and tropes and
what it means to be a human looking at humans."--Amber Sparks
"In Screen Tests, a voice who both is and is not the author picks up a
thread and follows it wherever it leads, leaping from one thread to
another without quite letting go, creating a delicate and ephemeral and
wonderful portrait of how a particular mind functions. Call them stories
(after Lydia Davis), reports (after Gerald Murnane), or screen tests
(inventing a new genre altogether like Antoine Volodine). These are
marvelously fugitive pieces, carefully composed while giving the
impression of being effortless, with a quite lovely Calvino-esque
lightness, that are a joy to try to keep up with."--Brian Evenson
