Heroines (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents)
"A brave, enlightening, and brutally honest historical inquiry that will leave readers with an urgent desire to tell their own stories."  -Bitchmagazine"Heroinesreads with an almost physical urgency, as though written  in a hot, hot heat, as Zambreno tangles and untangles historic and fictional literary ladies (Emma Bovary, Nicole Diver), all while chronicling her own creative frustration as she trails her husband from one backwater academic post to the next, trying to dig herself out of her own alienated funk. It's totally smart, provocative, and oddly sexy."--Martha Bayne,Chicago Reader"The book is startlingly insightful." --Jezebel.com,Books You Should Read"Issues a powerful clarion call for a supportive community of female writers who will fixate on their own experiences without shame and reject the "measuring rod" of the "Great American (Male) Novelist." --Publishers Weekly"I was reading your book intensely for days and people started asking, "Ok ok, what is this book?" What is this book you are so enraptured by? And I said, "Well, it's a book I've been waiting for for a long time." I am very excited it exists." --Mary Borkowski,The New Inquiry"It should come as no surprise that her provocative new work,Heroines, published by Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents imprint next month, challenges easy categorization, this time by poetically swerving in and out of memoir, diary, fiction, literary history, criticism, and theory. With equal parts unabashed pathos and exceptional intelligence, Heroines foregrounds female subjectivity to produce an impressive and original work that examines the suppression of various female modernists in relation to Zambreno's own complicated position as a writer and a wife." --Christopher Higgs,The Paris Reviewonline"Intensity and intelligence forge the baseline current that runs through and characterizes most of Kate Zambreno's written work." --The Millions, whereHeroineswas named one of the "Most Anticipated" Books of 2012."If you thought you knew a lot about the 'wives' of modernism and the various forms of silencing they suffered, Kate Zambreno'sHeroineswill teach you more; if you didn't know much, your mouth will fall open in enraged amazement. Zambreno admirably transforms copious research and personal experience into vernacular knowledge, then heats up the brew into a justified rant about dynamics that may have shape-shifted over the past 100 years but have (sadly) not disappeared. Bravo." --Maggie Nelson, author ofBluetsandThe Art of Cruelty