History & Criticism
![Kate Zambreno - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B005HWBG2M.jpg)
SCREEN TESTS
Book to Watch in 2019: The Millions, Nylon, Domino, Bustle, Book Riot, Buzzfeed, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
A new work equal parts observational micro-fiction and cultural criticism reflecting on the dailiness of life as a woman and writer, on fame and failure, aging and art, from the acclaimed author of Heroines, Green Girl, and O Fallen Angel.
In the first half of Kate Zambreno's astoundingly original collection Screen Tests, the narrator regales us with incisive and witty swatches from a life lived inside a brilliant mind, meditating on aging and vanity, fame and failure, writing and writers, along with portraits of everyone from Susan Sontag to Amal Clooney, Maurice Blanchot to Louise Brooks. The series of essays that follow, on figures central to Zambreno's thinking, including Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and Barbara Loden, are manifestoes about art, that ingeniously intersect and chime with the stories that came before them.
"If Thomas Bernhard's and Fleur Jaeggy's work had a charming, slightly misanthropic baby-with Diane Arbus as nanny-it would be Screen Tests. Kate Zambreno turns her precise and meditative pen toward a series of short fictions that are anything but small. The result is a very funny, utterly original look at cultural figures and tropes and what it means to be a human looking at humans."-Amber Sparks
"In Screen Tests, a voice who both is and is not the author picks up a thread and follows it wherever it leads, leaping from one thread to another without quite letting go, creating a delicate and ephemeral and wonderful portrait of how a particular mind functions. Call them stories (after Lydia Davis), reports (after Gerald Murnane), or screen tests (inventing a new genre altogether like Antoine Volodine). These are marvelously fugitive pieces, carefully composed while giving the impression of being effortless, with a quite lovely Calvino-esque lightness, that are a joy to try to keep up with."-Brian Evenson
A new work equal parts observational micro-fiction and cultural criticism reflecting on the dailiness of life as a woman and writer, on fame and failure, aging and art, from the acclaimed author of Heroines, Green Girl, and O Fallen Angel.
In the first half of Kate Zambreno's astoundingly original collection Screen Tests, the narrator regales us with incisive and witty swatches from a life lived inside a brilliant mind, meditating on aging and vanity, fame and failure, writing and writers, along with portraits of everyone from Susan Sontag to Amal Clooney, Maurice Blanchot to Louise Brooks. The series of essays that follow, on figures central to Zambreno's thinking, including Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and Barbara Loden, are manifestoes about art, that ingeniously intersect and chime with the stories that came before them.
"If Thomas Bernhard's and Fleur Jaeggy's work had a charming, slightly misanthropic baby-with Diane Arbus as nanny-it would be Screen Tests. Kate Zambreno turns her precise and meditative pen toward a series of short fictions that are anything but small. The result is a very funny, utterly original look at cultural figures and tropes and what it means to be a human looking at humans."-Amber Sparks
"In Screen Tests, a voice who both is and is not the author picks up a thread and follows it wherever it leads, leaping from one thread to another without quite letting go, creating a delicate and ephemeral and wonderful portrait of how a particular mind functions. Call them stories (after Lydia Davis), reports (after Gerald Murnane), or screen tests (inventing a new genre altogether like Antoine Volodine). These are marvelously fugitive pieces, carefully composed while giving the impression of being effortless, with a quite lovely Calvino-esque lightness, that are a joy to try to keep up with."-Brian Evenson
Editorial Reviews
"still my favorite book of 2019, a book of surprises, provocations, challengesand wonders, an unclassifiable book, totally sui generis...Whatever else this is,this is thinking--at least as Elizabeth Bishop styled it, a mind in motion, ratherthan at rest, not resolved thought but a voice thinking." (Robert Polito)
"Kate Zambreno's Screen Tests does something brilliant with celebrity and autofiction and the possibilities of the flash form."- Emily Nemens, The Paris Review, "Favorite Books of 2019"
"Kate Zambreno's Screen Tests does something brilliant with celebrity and autofiction and the possibilities of the flash form."- Emily Nemens, The Paris Review, "Favorite Books of 2019"
Readers Top Reviews
A. J. SutterC Donny
In his book "In Praise of Good Bookstores," Jeff Deutsch says he envies the reader discovering Kate Zambreno for the first time. On that recommendation, I picked up this book. KZ was born in the Midwest at the end of the 1970s. She seems obsessed with the Warhol and other Lower Manhattan art scenes of the 1960s and 1970s, yet with the attention span of someone who grew up with MTV. Her most sustained pieces of writing in this book are at most 3-5 pages, and her longer "essays" are mosaics (a pretentious word, under the circumstances) of short observations that roll out at many tidbits per page. Her subjects are cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe, Cathy Acker and Susan Sontag, with occasional shout-outs to the likes of Clarice Lispector, Thomas Bernhard and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who seem to function as condiments only. However, throughout the main subject is KZ herself. The final, and longest, essay, a sort of parallel life of the actress & director Barbara Loden and KZ's roommate Ronnie, is slightly more selfless, and the better for it. Maybe it's a generational thing, or maybe it's a New Yorker thing, but as someone who spent most of the 1960s and 1970s in New York I found this writing self-indulgent posing (with the exception of some brief, funny "stories" imagining Susan Sontag in a bear suit: I always found Susan Sontag insufferably self-righteous). The book's style is very typical of the musings that wannabe writers would jot down in their Moleskins (with Rapidographs, if you really want historical accuracy): I went through that phase, too, in my 20s, albeit with different stationery. If you're too young to have lived through that period, then maybe this will give you a vicarious bohemian thrill. But regardless of age, you'd be better off reading Lispector or Bernhard, for whom stories are stories (and no less funny than what's in this book, in many cases) or even Sontag, for whom an essay was really an essay.
