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Kate Zambreno

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Heroine Worship: Talking with Kate Zambreno , Christopher Higgs. Kate Zambreno’s first book, O Fallen Angel, won Chiasmus Press’s “Undoing the Novel” First Book Contest, and her second book, Green Girl, was a finalist for the Starcherone Innovative Fiction Prize. So it should come as no surprise that her provocative new work, Heroines, published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents imprint next month, challenges easy categorization, this time by poetically swerving in and out of memoir, diary, fiction, literary history, criticism, and theory. With equal parts unabashed pathos and exceptional intelligence, Heroines foregrounds female subjectivity to produce an impressive and original work that examines the suppression of various female modernists in relation to Zambreno’s own complicated position as a writer and a wife. It concludes by bringing the problems of the modernists into conversation with the contemporary by offering a timely consideration of the role of the Internet and blogs in creating a community for women writers.

Yeah. To some degree, yes. Anna Kavan | The Paris Review. What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Kate Zambreno} Kate Zambreno is the author of O Fallen Angel, which won Chiasmus Press’ “Undoing the Novel—First Book Contest.” Another novel, Green Girl, will be published by Emergency Press in Fall 2011. A nonfiction book revolving around the women of modernism, Heroines, will be published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series in Fall 2012. She writes the blog Frances Farmer is My Sister.

She is also an editor at Nightboat Books. Question #1 Experimental writing, as a category or concept, seems fraught with widespread confusion and misunderstanding. When I once tried to explain to someone that my first book coming out—O Fallen Angel—was a work of “experimental literature”—he was like “You mean like a tree is really a person?” But in the 20th century up to now—since modernism—literature has been experimental and has engaged with and broken with the past. Question #2 Again, isn’t this what process is? Question #3 No, that rings false for me, absolutely. Question #4 Question #5 Oh—this is way too hard!

Anna Kavan & Madness Part One. Anna Kavan. Heroines | Heroines was published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series in November 2012.Distributed by MIT Press. On the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the female modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno’s blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist “wives and mistresses.” In her blog entries, Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers’ muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today’s “toxic girls” could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.

Maisonneuve. Context N°18. Context N°21 Shimon Ballas. Outcast. Trans. Ammiel Alcalay and Oz Shelach. In Outcast Shimon Ballas introduces an old man, a Jew born in Iraq who converted to Islam in the 1930s, reviewing his divided existence. Violette Leduc. The lady of the title is a desirous Mrs. Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlap. “Rest areas, monotonous? Christine Brooke-Rose. The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus, first issued in 1986, provides a crash course in this prolific author’s too long neglected fiction, offering four of her early novels: Out (1964), Such (1966), Between (1968), and Thru (1975).

My Heroine: Lovesong for a Blog | Very Literary: A community blog. For someone hooked up to Thou, the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.- Anne Carson, "the Glass Essay" Talking about someone, even in a loving way, can be fatiguing, the way receiving good news can still be draining. After experiencing a particularly severe episode of something like Holly Golightly's mean reds, a query of mine was answered promisingly: an editor I admired wanted to see my portfolio. Even this unexpected good news disintegrated me because it meant more work, more lurching towards another person where I was going to be vulnerable and where I would disappoint.

Sometimes I feel like this, and reading my favorite books goes a long way towards undoing that feeling, and when it does, I want to shout it from the rooftops. Kate Zambreno has a new book coming out this winter from Semiotext(e) called Heroines, a critical memoire, and I am freaking out. I started reading Frances Farmer Is My Sister.