'To Write As If Already Dead' by Professor Kate Zambreno out in June

To Write As If Already Dead, a hybrid work by Adjunct Professor Kate Zambreno, will be released by Columbia University Press on June 8, 2021. Columbia will also host a live Zoom conversation between Zambreno and translator Kate Briggs on June 14, 2021, at 1pm Eastern Standard Time.

The book is presented as a failed study of Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, a diaristic work in which Guibert writes about his rapid decline from AIDS. Zambreno begins her work with a novella that reads like a detective story in which the protagonist searches for a lost online friendship. The novella then gives way to a writer's notebook which considers two bodies both dealing with historical plagues, and Zambreno expertly continues and adds to Guibert's meditations on friendship, mortality, connection, precarity, and more. 

According to Publishers Weekly, "In this clever hybrid work, Zambreno interrogates her fascination with French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert...a cascading meditation on what makes writing possible and necessary," 

Moyra Davey, author of Index Cards, added that "This book is a tour de force. I was completely awestruck by the way Zambreno enacts the concept of the title, and by the way she writes the body, hers and Guibert's. It is a moving performative act, a document of our time from the trenches, and a brilliant critical study."

Kate Zambreno is the author of many acclaimed books, including Drifts (2020), Appendix Project (2019), Screen Tests (2019), Book of Mutter (2017), and Heroines (2012). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.