The Light Room

‘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’

Sinead Gleeson, author of Constellations

‘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’

Jenny Odell, bestselling author of How to Do Nothing

In The Light Room, Zambreno offers her most profound and affecting work yet: a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public health, climate change, and the future we can expect for our children. Moving through the seasons, returning often to parks and green spaces, Zambreno captures the isolation and exhaustion of being home with a baby and a small child, but also small and transcendent moments of beauty and joy. Inspired by writers and artists ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, Yuko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world.

How will our memories, and our children’s, be affected by this time of profound disconnection? What does it mean to bring new life, and new work, into this moment of precarity and crisis? In The Light Room, Kate Zambreno offers a vision of how to live in ways that move away from disenchantment, and toward light and possibility.

Author Biography

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.