Kate Zambreno Takes Issue With What Counts as ‘Literature’

What books are on your night stand?

A bit of a brag, but I just got the Annie Ernaux box set from Seven Stories. I’m teaching all 13 books for a graduate seminar on Ernaux this semester, and there were a few I didn’t have. It’s still wrapped in plastic — the combination of open cups and the humidifier is often risky. Also, galleys by friends whose work I’ve been in conversation with for more than a decade — Suzanne Scanlon’s “Committed,” Danielle Dutton’s “Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other” and Sofia Samatar’s “Opacities.”

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

Anywhere there are not children in my ear.

What’s the last great book you read?

I am currently reading Magda Szabo’s “The Door,” and it’s all I can think about. It’s like I’m living in that claustrophobic dyad between two women in a Hungarian village.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you?

Probably revealing that I devoured the romances when I was too young to understand them — “Gone With the Wind,” “Wuthering Heights.”

What kind of reading do you do with your own children?

Their father more often reads to them. But I like reading them the Chirri & Chirra picture books by Kaya Doi, published in translation from the Japanese by Enchanted Lion Books. Two sisters ride their bicycles and go on all of these charming magical adventures. We’ve gone through Moomins phases as well. My oldest also loves being read Tove Jansson’s “The Summer Book,” one of my favorites.

How do you organize your books?

I write in “Heroines” that I organize books by literary gossip. There’s still some of that — also relation and influence — often by language or country. The Austrian Great Haters (Elfriede Jelinek, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard), next to Sebald next to Walser. The French (Marie NDiaye, Hervé Guibert, Duras), Japanese (Yoko Tawada, Mieko Kanai, Hiroko Oyamada, Yuko Tsushima), a shelf of Spanish language (César Aira next to Enrique Vila-Matas next to Jazmina Barrera). Dorothee Elmiger (my German translator), who also published Heike Geissler’s “Seasonal Associate” in the original German. Iman Mersal next to Haytham El-Wardany, translated from the Arabic.

What do you find when you reread your own work?

Passion and intensity, which is strange because I’m usually so exhausted.

How have you changed as a writer since publishing “Heroines”?

To reference Ernaux, I’m more aware of my longing to be inside literature, and the fact that the experiences I want to write about are often seen as outside of literature.

What, if anything, has changed in how literary tastemakers value men’s and women’s personal stories since you published “Heroines”?

First-person narrative by men is still published and reviewed as more serious and gets a lot more money and coverage. It’s also usually not dismissed as merely autofiction or memoir, instead read as literature encompassing psychogeography, philosophy, art criticism. Even if a woman is doing exactly that, she’s usually still marketed as merely writing a woman’s experience or, worse, a mom memoir, if she has children.

Whose journals or letters do you most wish you could read?

My mother’s.

Who is the most misunderstood writer in your estimation?

I am not sure Marguerite Duras, Hervé Guibert, etc. thought they were writing “autofiction,” and I’m not sure many writers outside of M.F.A. programs sit down and think “I’m writing autofiction.” The writer of autofiction!

What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?

The newest Dory Fantasmagory — both my 3-year-old and 7-year-old are obsessed. There’s a joke about Dory freaking out when she learns Mozart is dead that gets me every time.

The last book that made you furious?

I have a stack of books about gentrification all published by Verso I’m waiting to go through — I am sure those will make me productively furious.

The introduction to the reissue of “Heroines” credits you as an expert at “miserabilism.” So — the last book that made you miserable?

“Die, My Love” by the Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz recently wrecked me — her narrator is almost ecstatic with misery at her domestic claustrophobia with a new baby. And as a companion, Olga Ravn’s “My Work.”

What do you plan to read next?

Nate Lippens’s “Ripcord,” being published by Semiotext(e) in the fall, the second in his loose trilogy of Wisconsin books. His voice is so furious, tender and hilarious.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

I would invite my friends who are geniuses, and who I would otherwise never get to see, together or at all. Three that come to mind are Bhanu Kapil, Sofia Samatar and Danielle Dutton.