Drifts

Named a Most Anticipated Book of May by Entertainment Weekly, Elle, Esquire, Salon, Dazed, Refinery29, Medium, LitHub, and The Millions. "A lyrical, fragmentary, and heartfelt story about the beauty and difficulty of artistic isolation." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Haunting and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances-the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment-leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything. A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.

Kate Zambreno is the author of several acclaimed books including Screen Tests, Heroines, and Green Girl. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, she teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College.