Drifts

house in a tree-lined neighborhood so remote it was almost a suburb. The title of the book came from a feeling, and I wanted to write through this feeling. Drifts existed in the space of the day, in all the notebooks I filled up. What I really wanted to write was my present tense, which seemed impossible. How can a paragraph be a day, or a day a paragraph? But I couldn t often exist in the room, or even in this paragraph, now. I found myself always distracted.  
 
The publishing people told me that I was writing a novel, but I was unsure. What I didn t tell them is that what I longed to write was a small book of wanderings, animals. A paper-thin object, a ghost. Filled with an incandescence toward the possibility of a book, as well as a paralysis. Maybe I was writing a novel, in the Robert Walser sense, his short forms like moods and digressions. For me the sketches I produce now and then are shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn apart book of myself.
 
What is a drift? Perhaps a drift is a sort of form.

For some time, I have been interested in the writing one is doing when one is not writing. All that summer, I email often throughout the day with Anna, a more successful writer, living in a different city. We have both been under contract for our respective novels for several years. Art is time, Anna writes me, a novel especially, it must be slow, it must take the time it needs. All that summer I attempt time. I try not to let the days bleed. I attempt to be in the room, outside of the internet. That summer, along with my daily black journals that accumulate in rows like gravestones, I begin keeping a notebook that I think of as the Drifts notebook, its cover a canary yellow that matches my copy of Walser s The Tanners<

self-isolation.   Kyle Chayka, The New Republic 

Zambreno has been putting out smart, underrecognized novels for a decade . . . [Drifts is] a creation story that ably leaves in the in-between bits, drawing a startlingly accurate account of what it means to be in the process of writing while barely putting words to paper. Vulture

A genre-defying diary of everyday textures . . . [Drifts] charts the search for a new genre, a search that Zambreno has been pursuing her whole career. Los Angeles Review of Books

Marvelous . . . . abundantly productive and imaginative . . . unspools as coolly as ribbon in the wind. The Rumpus

Utterly invigorating . . . A meditative, radically self-aware book. The Observer

Hilarious yet haunting. Salon

Sublime new fiction [from] one of our most formally ambitious writers . . . Give yourself over to the undulant music of this bold novel, and let yourself be buffeted along on the restless journey of the narrator s creative awakening. Esquire
 
Quietly stirring. Harper s Bazaar

Zambreno s approach is not just a flex, it s a quiet revolution. . . . by using her powers to describe, and thereby elevate, early motherhood, she produces a new kind of criticism that integrates the creation of life with the creation of art. Electric Lit

A timely chronicle of loneliness . . . Its protagonist feels like a sympathetic comrade for any woman who is unravelling slightly within four walls right now. Dazed

It is thrilling to see Zambreno at such a creative peak. . . . [Drifts] is hypnotic and contemplative, a magnetic novel that both surprises and puts us in a trance. Chicago Review of Books

Zambreno captures the mind-bending experience of being a body moving through space and time, lurching after stability, teetering down urban and memory alleyways in search of a place to fix one s quivering body and mind. Lit Hub

Immersive, moving, and profound. . . . [I] was sorry that it had to end. Book Riot

A lyrical, fragmentary, and heartfelt story about the beauty and difficulty of artistic isolation. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Immersive [and] exciting . . . a captivating deconstruction of the writer s process that will reward readers in search for meaning. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A giddily enjoyable read, emotionally conspiratorial in tone, full of brilliant critical observations and realistic depictions of the dramas in a modern artist s daily life. BookPage (starred review)

Zambreno is perceptive, funny, and spellbinding as she reflects on and dramatizes the infinite complexities of womanhood and creativity. Booklist

Drifts gathers up multiple ways of seeing, feeling and understanding, layering fiction, meditation, biography, confession and prose poetry into one capacious structure. This is an extraordinary book. Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland

A spirited, shape-shifting read that is by turns insightful, intimate, speculative, and mischievous. In her search to uncover the form's rich potential, Zambreno is unafraid to show us what she too is made of. Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond

Kate Zambreno s writing is mysterious, unclassifiable, and yet intimate and familiar too. Reading her is like looking through a kaleidoscope the world is at once more beautiful and more terrifying.   Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart

Ravishingly intense and tender[,] an intimate portrait of the mind of a writer on the verge of disappearing. . . . Utterly original, transfixing, infectious. . . . I couldn t put it down. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of Call Me Zebra