If you thought you knew a lot about the 'wives' of modernism and the various forms of silencing they suffered, Kate Zambreno's Heroines will teach you more; if you didn't know much, your mouth will fall open in enraged amazement. Zambreno admirably transforms copious research and personal experience into vernacular knowledge, then heats up the brew into a justified rant about dynamics that may have shape-shifted over the past 100 years but have (sadly) not disappeared. Bravo. -- Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty
Kate Zambreno is the author of the novels Green Girl and O Fallen Angel as well as the nonfiction Heroines and Book of Mutter (both published by Semiotexte(e)).
The book is startlingly insightful.Listed in "Books You Should
Read"— Jezebel.com
Issues a powerful clarion call for a supportive community of female
writers who will fixate on their own experiences without shame and
reject the 'measuring rod' of the 'Great American (Male)
Novelist.'—Publishers Weekly
I was reading your book intensely for days and people started
asking, 'Ok ok, what is this book?' What is this book you are so
enraptured by? And I said, 'Well, it's a book I've been waiting for
for a long time.' I am very excited it exists.—Mary Borkowski, The
New Inquiry
It should come as no surprise that her provocative new work,
Heroines, published by Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents imprint next
month, challenges easy categorization, this time by poetically
swerving in and out of memoir, diary, fiction, literary history,
criticism, and theory. With equal parts unabashed pathos and
exceptional intelligence, Heroines foregrounds female subjectivity
to produce an impressive and original work that examines the
suppression of various female modernists in relation to Zambreno's
own complicated position as a writer and a wife.—Christopher Higgs,
The Paris Review Online
Intensity and intelligence forge the baseline current that runs
through and characterizes most of Kate Zambreno's written
work.Heroines was named one of the 'Most Anticipated' Books of
2012.—The Millions
For anyone interested in the present and future of literature,
Heroines is required reading, and rereading.—Liz Baudler,
Examiner.com
Named one of the best books of 2012 by Laurie Penny in The New
Statesman ('a lush, lyrical feminist memoir'), by Michele Filgate
and Karolina Waclawiak at Salon, by Elissa Schappell at the Tin
House blog, by Tobias Carroll at Vol. 1 Brooklyn, by Laura Pearson
at Time Out Chicago, at The Nervous Breakdown, the ICA London blog,
at Drawn&Quarterly bookstore, and by Verso Books.—
In her third book, Heroines, a genre-defying battle cry about
forgotten and suppressed women in literature (as well as her role
in the gendered story of her own life), Zambreno's mirror is more
relentless and reflective than ever. A scholarly treatise for
readers who never cared about scholarship, and a memoir for those
who have had enough with the insularity of simple confession,
Heroines synthesizes the raw passion of a diary with the relevance
and scope of nothing less than the history of literature. As 2012
nears a close, I'm hard-pressed to think of a book I've read this
year that obsessed me more in the moment, rippled out as much into
my daily life and conversations, or left more powerful
aftershocks.—Gina Frangello, The Rumpus
Heroines reads with an almost physical urgency, as though written
in a hot, hot heat, as Zambreno tangles and untangles historic and
fictional literary ladies (Emma Bovary, Nicole Diver), all while
chronicling her own creative frustration as she trails her husband
from one backwater academic post to the next, trying to dig herself
out of her own alienated funk. It's totally smart, provocative, and
oddly sexy.—Martha Bayne, Chicago Reader
Heroines is part literary criticism, part literary history, part
memoir, part feminist polemic. In its form and in its writing,
Heroines is what the author is trying to rescue and reclaim: to use
Zambreno's favourite words, it's messy, girly, and excessive. It's
also sharp, finely-structured, and meticulously (voraciously)
researched.—Subashini Navaratnam , Popmatters
Zambreno stages an impassioned encounter between the medicalised
lives of Jane Bowles, Vivienne Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald and other
Modernist wives and mistresses and her own struggles as a young
woman and a writer. The book sizzles with combative, confessional
wit as she deconstructs the toxic strategies that Anglo-US culture
uses to dismiss or erase 'the girl writing'. Brilliant and
groundbreaking.—David Kennedy , Times Higher Education
Heroines gives itself permission to be the kind of work of
criticism that sometimes has tears in its eyes, that is a little
red in the face by the end of the argument because it just loves
the books so much; it is so invested. It is these qualities that
make the book feel vast, voluptuous, while at the same time
focused. It is heavily researched, sharply observed. It Takes Up
Space but it does so on its own terms. And that Zambreno sets this
example and does so boldly is, for me, one of the most exciting
things about the work.—Aimee Wall, Maisonneuve
The writing in Heroines is sharp, visceral, self-avowedly furious,
often brilliant…—Jerome Boyd Maunsell, Times Literary
Supplement
Zambreno doesn't write with the measured voice of someone who can
count on being listened to, but with the wail of someone confined
to a shed.—Sheila Heti, London Review of Books
It is in her 'counterattack against this censorship; that Zambreno
is at her most exhilarating and eviscerating: rightfully unashamed
to acknowledge that it began from a position of anger, Heroines is
rigorous and confident, fiercely intelligent in its demand for a
fairer way of reading, writing and writing about women—past,
present and future.—Juliet Jacques, New Statesman
The book sizzles with combative, confessional wit as she
deconstructs the toxic strategies that Anglo-US culture uses to
dismiss or erase 'the girl writing'. Brilliant and
groundbreaking.—David Kennedy, Times Higher Education
An eloquent plea that diaries and other traditionally 'feminine'
forms of writing be paid their due.—Kate Rouhandeh, The Paris
Review Online
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