Surprise Castle
To Write as If Already Dead

To Write as If Already Dead - Paperback

$21.99
Quantity
01

Pay over time for orders over $35.00 with

Availability:In StockContributor:Kate ZambrenoSeries:RereadingsPublish date:2021-06-08Pages:176
Language:EnglishPublisher:Columbia University PressISBN-13:9780231188456ISBN-10:231188455UPC:9780231188456Book Category:Literary CriticismBook Subcategory:Books & Reading, Modern, AmericanBook Topic:20th CenturySize:7.70 x 5.00 x 0.50 inchesWeight:0.4497Product ID:SC1SNZX2NT

To Write As If Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno's failed attempts to write a study of Herv? Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. In this diaristic, transgressive work, the first in a cycle written in the years preceding his death, Guibert documents with speed and intensity his diagnosis and disintegration from AIDS and elegizes a character based on Michel Foucault.

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.

Throughout this rigorous, mischievous, thrilling not-quite study, Guibert lingers as a ghost companion. Zambreno, who has been pushing the boundaries of literary form for a decade, investigates his methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy and confessional force of Guibert's work, an ode to his slippery, scarcely classifiable genre. The book asks, as Foucault once did, "What is an author?" Zambreno infuses this question with new urgency, exploring it through the anxieties of the internet age, the ethics of friendship, and "the facts of the body" illness, pregnancy, and death.
Language:EnglishPublisher:Columbia University PressISBN-13:9780231188456ISBN-10:231188455UPC:9780231188456Book Category:Literary CriticismBook Subcategory:Books & Reading, Modern, AmericanBook Topic:20th CenturySize:7.70 x 5.00 x 0.50 inchesWeight:0.4497Product ID:SC1SNZX2NT
Kate Zambreno is the author of many acclaimed books, including Drifts (2020), Appendix Project (2019), Screen Tests (2019), Book of Mutter (2017), and Heroines (2012). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Contributor(s)

Kate Zambreno

Free shipping on orders over $75. Standard shipping takes 3-7 business days. Returns accepted within 30 days of purchase.

Recently Viewed

View All