Drifts
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.
Selected praise:
‘[Drifts] captures the fitful stops, starts, shame, joy, and boredom that go into creating a work of art.’ — The Paris Review
‘Full of wit and candor.’ — Catherine Lacey, The New York Times Book Review
‘Mesmerizing… Zambreno’s persona on the page is a tracker of moods and feelings that resist being stuffed and mounted with words.’ — The New Yorker
‘As embodied as novels come, practically vibrational as its narrator snatches her ideas out of the air and turns them into, well, “Drifts.”’— The Los Angeles Times
‘Drifts gathers up multiple ways of seeing, feeling and understanding, layering fiction, meditation, biography, confession and prose poetry into one capacious structure. This is an extraordinary book.’ — Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland
‘A spirited, shape-shifting read that is by turns insightful, intimate, speculative, and mischievous. In her search to uncover the form’s rich potential, Zambreno is unafraid to show us what she too is made of.’— Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond
‘A stunning book that shows how life can be pregnant with possibility, even and especially when we feel isolated. . . . With the melancholic splendor of its prose, Drifts is the perfect book for the moment we’re living in.’ — The Boston Globe
‘Intricate and finely tuned… There’s an improvisatory quality to the text, like a wet-painted brushstroke… Brilliantly evokes a hazy state of self-isolation.’— Kyle Chayka, The New Republic
‘A genre-defying diary of everyday textures… [Drifts] charts the search for a new genre, a search that Zambreno has been pursuing her whole career.’ — The Los Angeles Review of Books
‘Utterly invigorating… A meditative, radically self-aware book.’ — The Observer
‘Sublime new fiction [from] one of our most formally ambitious writers… Give yourself over to the undulant music of this bold novel, and let yourself be buffeted along on the restless journey of the narrator’s creative awakening.’ — Esquire