The Light Room

From "one of our most formally ambitious writers" (Esquire), a moving account of art and caretaking in our precarious present. The Light Room takes place over the course of cloistered seasons, between the rooms of an apartment and a city's green spaces, amid the exhaustion and isolation of caring for a baby and a small child. In search of relief from a moment both monotonous and profoundly uncertain, Zambreno engages a lineage of other writers and artists who have made art from a daily practice--from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, Yūko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz.What does it mean to bring new life, and new work, into this world of precarity and crisis? How are our memories, and our children's, affected by our profound disconnection? Zambreno's most poetic, tender, and philosophical work yet, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world.

Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts; To Write As if Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert; The Light Room; and a collaborative study on tone in literature with Sofia Samatar. They live in Brooklyn with their two children and their partner, John Vincler. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, they are a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU.