"Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute
present, real life captured in closeup." --Annie Ernaux, winner of the
Nobel Prize in Literature
From "one of our most formally ambitious writers" (Esquire), a moving
account of caretaking in a time of uncertainty and loss
"Kate Zambreno's writing is mysterious, unclassifiable, and yet intimate
and familiar," Jenny Zhang has written. Now, Zambreno offers her most
profound and affecting work yet: a candid chronicle of life as a mother
of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public
health, climate change, and the future we can expect for our children.
Moving through the seasons, returning often to parks and green spaces,
Zambreno captures the isolation and exhaustion of being home with a baby
and a small child, but also small and transcendent moments of beauty and
joy. Inspired by writers and artists ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to
Joseph Cornell, Yūko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David
Wojnarowicz, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of
community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living
world.
How will our memories, and our children's, be affected by this time of
profound disconnection? What does it mean to bring new life, and new
work, into this moment of precarity and crisis? In The Light Room,
Kate Zambreno offers a vision of how to live in ways that move away from
disenchantment, and toward light and possibility.
