Kate Zambreno
[2] An early influence was Cynthia Carr’s Village Voice "On Edge" columns, where she learned about the work of Karen Finley, David Wojnarowicz, and Kathy Acker.
She has spoken of Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, Virginia Woolf, Sarah Kane, Marguerite Duras, and Elfriede Jelinek as early writing influences.
She also was asked to perform Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School at the MoMA,[8] a revisiting of the 1978 Cine-Virus program curated by Kathryn Bigelow and Michael Oblowitz.
Besides Kathy Acker, she has been compared to Marguerite Duras,[9] Lydia Davis,[10] Thomas Bernhard,[11] Roland Barthes,[9] Elfriede Jelinek,[12] Virginia Woolf,[13] Hélène Cixous,[14] and Hervé Guibert.
Along with the artist John Vincler, as the collective La Genet,[18] she made a series of pink silk sculptures hung on the main building and gave a performance at Naropa’s Violence and Community symposium,[19] curated by Kapil, which involved reading a text that became the chapbook, “Apoplexia, Toxic Shock and Toilet Bowl: Some Notes on Why I Write,” published by Guillotine.
[18][20] She curated two Prose Events for Belladonna*, where she was in conversation with the writers Renee Gladman, Amina Cain, Danielle Dutton, Bhanu Kapil,[21] among others.
[22] She has said she shares affinities with the writers Sofia Samatar, Amina Cain, Danielle Dutton, Bhanu Kapil, Suzanne Scanlon, Moyra Davey, T. Fleischmann, and Kate Briggs.
Of the novel, Michael Schaub at Bookslut wrote: "So enter Kate Zambreno, who is as much Acker as she is Woolf, as much Angela Carter as she is Elfriede Jelinek.
James Greer at Bookforum wrote "The book is by turns bildungsroman, sociological study, deconstruction, polemic, and live-streamed dialogue with Jean Rhys, Clarice Lispector, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, the Bible, Roland Barthes, and most of Western European modernism by way of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project[30] Elissa Schapell at Vanity Fair wrote "I can’t recall the last time I read a book whose heroine infuriated and seduced me as completely as Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl.
"[31] Heroines has been described as a "critical memoir," around Zambreno's obsessive life-writing of the minor figures and "mad wives" of literary modernism—Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Zelda Fitzgerald, Jean Rhys.
According to Roxane Gay, who included essays on both Zambreno's Green Girl and Heroines in her Harper Perennial bestseller Bad Feminist, "Her criticism rises from emotion.
"[37] For Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents, edited by Chris Kraus and Hedi El-Kholti, in March 2017, Zambreno published Book of Mutter, a fragmented, lyric essay on mourning and the mother modeled on Louise Bourgeois’s Cells.
[38] Jenny Hendrix wrote in the Times Literary Supplement: "Above all, Book of Mutter is a work of tone; it expresses a failure to transcend grief, written from a place of guilt and shame, in halting and inarticulate gestures...Writing may not change anything, may not heal or even console—but, like Bourgeois's Cells, it creates a space in which formlessness, pain and chaos are enclosed and held like holy relics in a church.
The first half of To Write as if Already Dead is a novella in the mode of a detective story, searching after the mysterious disappearance of an online friendship after an intense dialogue on anonymity, names, language, and connection.
The second half, a notebook documenting the doubled history of two bodies amid another historical plague, continues the meditation on friendship, solitude, time, mortality, precarity, art, and literature.
