The Light Room

Early reviews called this book a miracle between two covers. In The Light Room , Zambreno writes about the intersections of catastrophes that unfold on a global scale . . . Zambreno writes with a sense of hope that will especially resonate with anyone who's soldiered through pandemic-era parenting

Early reviews called this book a miracle between two covers. In The Light Room , Zambreno writes about the intersections of catastrophes that unfold on a global scale . . . Zambreno writes with a sense of hope that will especially resonate with anyone who's soldiered through pandemic-era parenting

Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup

The Light Room is both a gift and a beacon

One of our most formally ambitious writers

Kate Zambreno has performed a miracle, capturing real, lived time from within the exhaustion of pandemic-era parenthood. The Light Room reminded me of that fundamental magic of writing-that the details of another person's life, so precisely and honestly rendered, can instantly loosen the edges of your own life and make you feel less alone

One of the great uncategorizable writers of our time

Elegant. . . . This is a book about the aloneness of motherhood - the limits of maternal attention, the dissolution of self, the mind-numbing tedium of raising small children - [and] a book about a "life inside" - not just inside the home, but inside the mind. . . . It may be among the most lasting literature of Covid, a lightbox for the future: the story of a mother looking for brightness in a diary of dark days

When Kate Zambreno writes she must use a special microscope, with which she studies the dust in the sunlight, and the clutter of motherhood, and the thinnest fibers of exhaustion and hope. The Light Room is a miracle, a wooden box with a golden clasp filled with the specimens of all our most precious, disappearing days

Kate Zambreno is the author of nine books, most recently The Light Room , a meditation on art and care. Tone, a collaborative study with the writer and scholar Sofia Samatar , under The Committee to Investigate Atmosphere , is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Zambreno's fiction and reports have been published in The New Yorker , The Paris Review , Granta , VQR , Astra , BOMB , and more. Zambreno's books have been translated into seven languages. Kate Zambreno is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches graduate nonfiction at Columbia University. Zambreno is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.