Screen Tests: Stories and Other Writing

“Zambreno’s books have a way of getting under your skin. . . . in an era in which it feels as though we all constantly need to market ourselves, it’s refreshing to read a book that explicitly champions art that is raw, art that is messy, art that cannot be contained.” —The Paris Review

“There is no other writer on the planet like Kate Zambreno.”— Lidia Yuknavitch

A Best Book of 2019: Nylon, Domino, Bustle, Book Riot, Buzzfeed, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

From the acclaimed author of Heroines, Green Girl, and O Fallen Angel, 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, and aging and art.

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 manifestos about art, that ingeniously intersect and chime with the stories that came before them.