Kate Zambreno

A curious exploration of mortality, alienation, boredom, surveillance and how we regard ourselves among the animals. ‘Few human animals have Zambreno’s baleful honesty, insight, or relish for comedy, when they look at themselves’ Daisy Hildyard, author of Hunters in the Snow and EmergencyAnimal Stories begins with Kate Zambreno’s visit to the monkey house at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where one stark tree ‘seems to be the stage design for a simian production of Waiting for Godot’. But who are the players and who is the audience, and can they recognise each othe? hat follows is a series of reports from the deep strangeness of the zoo, a space that is ‘more often than not deeply sad, an odd choice for regular pilgrimages of fun’. Amid these excursions with their young children, Zambreno turns to Garry Winogrand’s photographs and John Berger’s writings on animals, reshaping the spectator as the subject to decipher our complex ‘zoo feelings’ – what we project, and what we refuse to see. In ‘My Kafka System’, which dovetails with these zoo studies, Zambreno thinks through the notebooks and animal stories of a writer known for playing at the threshold between species, continuing their investigation into the false divide between human and animal. In writing that is inquisitive and inventive, Zambreno renders visible the enclosures we construct and those we occupy ourselves.

'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 'The Light Room is both a gift and a beacon' Sinead Gleeson, author of Constellations'Kate Zambreno has performed a miracle, capturing real, lived time from within the exhaustion of pandemic-era parenthood. The Light Room reminded me of that fundamental magic of writing - that the details of another person's life, so precisely and honestly rendered, can instantly loosen the edges of your own life and make you feel less alone' Jenny Odell, bestselling author of How to Do NothingIn The Light Room, 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, Yuko 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.