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A manifesto in lectures about the material conditions and absurdities of being a writer and adjunct professor under capitalism—by turns funny, angry, despairing, and hopeful—from a writer who “has invented a new form” (Annie Ernaux).
In the spring of 2025, Heroines and Drifts author Kate Zambreno taught a weeklong nonfiction “craft” lecture at Columbia University, thinking through the crises of the adjunct loop in the United States and the question of labor and writing in publishing and the university. This project became more absurd, and more urgent, as the Trump administration quickly turned to authoritarianism and the university became complicit with the administration, creating a dystopian and paranoid atmosphere in which students were kidnapped from university housing and student protestors were expelled. How can we study together and create under such conditions?
The resulting essays are funny, angry, often in despair, and somehow also full of optimism as to the future of writing, even amidst the collapse of the institutions meant to support writers and students. Zambreno engages with texts including Sofia Samatar’s Opacities, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, Noémi Lefebvre’s The Poetics of Work, Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, and Samuel Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.
A craft book against a “craft” divorced from political and material realities, Against Nonfiction is for anyone trying to write and make art in impossible times.
Praise for Kate Zambreno
“Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup.”
—Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
“With The Light Room, Zambreno—one of our most prolific and curious minds—chronicles what it’s like to be a mother amidst the various crises of this chaotic moment in history.”
—Vulture
“Zambreno’s work reminds us that there is grace in going for a walk and feeling the energy of the seasons. There’s value in play and stillness and making art even when it feels like the world is on fire. . . . Zambreno’s project, from book to book, seems in part to be recording and celebrating those quiet moments, like the blossoms on a cherry tree, beautiful but ephemeral, or a child sounding out her first word. Those moments are fleeting, but their impact remains long after they have elapsed.”
—Brian Gresko, Poets & Writers
“Zambreno is one of our most inventive and formally daring writers.”
—The Millions
Kate Zambreno is the author of more than ten books that confound genre and think through endurance and duration—variously novels, speculative essays and reports, performative lectures—including Drifts, Appendix Project, To Write as if Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert, The Light Room, and Animal Stories. They also co-authored, with Sofia Samatar, a work of experimental criticism, Tone. Forthcoming in Fall 2026 and Fall 2027 from Semiotext(e) are two novels of interiority and precarity, Foam and Performance Art. They are a doctoral student in Performance Studies at NYU. They live in Brooklyn.
One: Sabbatical, Sickness, Study
Two: What Is Realism?
Three: 🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂
Four: On Impasse
Five: Running My Little Mouth as Praxis
Six: White Spaces
Seven: Slutty Prose
Eight: Guest Logic
What I Was Thinking With