Screen Tests

by Kate Zambreno

A new work equal parts observational micro-fiction and cultural criticism reflecting on the dailiness of life as a woman and writer, on fame and failure, aging and art, from the acclaimed author of Heroines, Green Girl, and O Fallen Angel.

In the first half of Kate Zambreno’s astoundingly original collection Screen Tests, the narrator regales us with incisive and witty swatches from a life lived inside a brilliant mind, meditating on aging and vanity, fame and failure, writing and writers, along with portraits of everyone from Susan Sontag to Amal Clooney, Maurice Blanchot to Louise Brooks. The series of essays that follow, on figures central to Zambreno’s thinking, including Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and Barbara Loden, are manifestos about art that ingeniously intersect and chime with the stories that came before them.

Genres: Essays, Short Stories, Nonfiction, Art, Feminism, Writing, Memoir

304 pages, Paperback

First published July 23, 2019

About the author

Kate Zambreno is the author of the novels Green Girl (Harper Perennial) and O Fallen Angel (Harper Perennial). She is also the author of Heroines (Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents) and Book of Mutter (Semiotexte(e)'s Native Agents). A collection of talks and essays, The Appendix Project, is forthcoming from Semiotext(e) in April 2019, and a collection of stories and other writing, Screen Tests, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in June 2019. She is at work on a novel, Drifts, and a study of Hervé Guibert. She teaches at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.

Reviews

[Marie-Therese · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Too much name-dropping, too much coyness, way way way too much navel-gazing. You're just not that interesting, Kate-nobody's that interesting. Not even any of the people that aren't you that you occasionally try to write about.

Ideas are interesting and when you engage with ideas, concepts, works, you're interesting too! But the rest of this is just tiresome and reads like someone's lightly-edited private journal.

[Olivia Garner · Rating 3 out of 5]

We have the same taste in artists so I enjoyed reading her quips about those people but sometimes her voice as a writer reads like a 2010 tumblr text post

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

I LOVED this book!! Not least of which because Kate Zambreno and I are obsessed with all the exact same artists (Kathy Acker! Chantal Akerman! Susan Sontag! Clarice Lispector! Marguerite Duras! David Wojnarowicz!). The way all the little essays/memoirs/stories shapeshift from one topic to another one and back again so seamlessly!! I don’t know how to describe her writing style besides calling it very personal and very fluid in the way it blends biography and autobiography so smoothly. Every piece in here is short and sweet and it’s all so full of insights and connections and commentary on celebrity and myths of stardom. This is literally everything I look for in a book and also a bizarrely well-timed read after I read Chantal Akerman’s memoir and Kathy Acker’s interview book, both of which overlapped in a big way with a lot of these essays.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always, Kate Zambreno delivers a witty, creative, funny, smart, innovative, and insightful product. Although this book is a bit of a hodgepodge of different types of writing, and sometimes drips with apparently unwarranted self-pity, it’s filled with interesting ideas about gender, popular culture, and the writing life. It also gave me a new book or film recommendation on nearly every page.

[☄ · Rating 4 out of 5]

so much love for kate zambreno and her many, many obsessions!! it's such a comfort to know that there are other writers out there who absolutely cannot stop writing about the same things over and over again. it's wonderful. it's like a warm hug. i love u kate <33

[Andrew]

Kate Zambreno seems to be going, quite deliberately, for the bragging rights to be called a contemporary Sontag. Now I don’t necessarily think that this is a bad thing. We could all benefit from getting Sontag-teamed, and these kinda-but-not-sorta stories and pointillist essays all fit the bill. Sure, she’s self-obsessed, but I don’t care, I like it when authors are unafraid to wave their big dicks, especially when it’s a lady writer who’s unafraid to wave her big dick. She has confidence in her own voice, and she’s pretty freewheeling too, which in a literary landscape full of meek and inoffensive wordsmith types, is refreshing. When she talks about showing boys at bars her throat infection that she cures with menthols and popsicles… yeah, she’s clearly on my team.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t know. There were some fragments that I really enjoyed (the trifecta of Tallulah Bankhead / Heiress / Louise Brooks in a Mint Green Housecoat was a really interesting examination of like fame, femininity, and aging). But for the most part, I just felt like I was reading a journal that someone had written with the intention of writing a capital-j Journal.

[Tash · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a pretty big fan of Zambreno. I read what she writes, I see myself in it, I see myself writing like her, I feel like I could read her writing about the process of unclogging a drain and find it brilliant. That being said, I didn’t *love* “Screen Tests”. The book is made up of essays, and the screen tests, which are one to two page stories (a la Lydia Davis) or reports (Gerald Murnane), that reflect or wander around topics like writers (Sontag, Stein, Ferrante), cinema (dogs in film, Meg Ryan vehicle), photography, celebrity, philosophy, and so on. I think my problem was that I sat down and endeavoured to read the whole thing at once, which is probably antithetical to the idea of screen tests, and which did nothing but make me feel scattered and unsatisfied. The right way to read this book? Slowly, over time, when you feel like a literary aperitif. Then it will be a treat!

[Ben Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Screen Tests is an artfully poised lineup of quasi-Warholian novels and films. Kate Zambreno makes a strong case for each of these put-upon female artists, while the collection is also a shimmering delight in and of itself.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few passages from Screen Tests:


*


In a recent interview, I was asked to name a book I thought should be remembered. And I chose the Québécois writer Catherine Mavrikakis’s A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning. The narrator hotly mourns all of these friends who have dies of AIDS, all named Hervé. The narrator says she loves works that are tender and cruel, and that is what this is for me, a jeremiad, a beautiful complaint. The book is inspired by Hervé Guibert’s autoportrait, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, fictionalizing his friends Michel Foucault’s death from AIDS, which also documents Guibert’s own diagnosis, like a French companion to Close to the Knives.

The interviewer asked me to talk about New Narrative, and I told him that it was an avant-garde queer mostly American literary scene circling around community, and especially, memorializing friends and lovers who died of AIDS, refusing their disappearance. I rattled off names of New Narrative writers: Bruce Boone, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Kathy Acker, Gail Scott. The interviewers asked me if I thought there would ever be another movement where writers could be angry in force again, if there would be another crisis that would allow for a political literature.

I have thought about this question for a while now, and I think it connects to more than just writing – it’s about art making, it’s about a way of life that is opposed to a mainstream, homogenized success.

And I said to his that there is always something to be angry about, always something to rage against.


*


If I could only write throughout my entire life with the electricity of the amateur.


*


There needs to be a word, I’ve realized, for the parasitism of middlebrow art and literature that steals from interesting and radical art but in the process strips it of its ferality, its political urgency, its queerness, its threat. (Sarah Schulman uses the term “gentrified,” also connecting it to Acker.)


*


Writer’s block. How boring. I am supposed to be working on an essay, this essay in fact, but something stalls me. I cannot enter into it. I am unsure what is the use of all this first person anymore.

[joe]

I already knew that I had a matching interest in certain artists/writers that Zambreno had brought up here (Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, Susan Sontag), meaning that was a pull for me immediately.

I have to say I only enjoyed the first half of Screen Tests in fits and starts. A number of the writings fervently captured my attention, but things felt disjointed by a scattering of works that I found to not leave a mark. This could feel moderately frustrating when trying to connect the stories together and postulate on the sequencing of each small piece.

Things cranked up a notch in the second half, and I really didn't want to close the book as I was nearing the end. The writing felt more focused here. Some of the earlier flash fiction was teetering on the edge of sounding like tiny journal entries that didn't need to be published, whereas these final four works are Zambreno at her full-hearted A-game. Being a huge Olivia Laing fan, it was difficult not to see the similarities between this section and Laing's "The Lonely City". Not only because of the parallels in specific artist obsessions, but also in the writing; in the arguments being made; in the passion shown for various works of art. That passion seeps from the page, and I'm happy to ignore similarities when I can delight in reading and witnessing a person - any person - talking about something they love.

If I could cherry-pick my favourite stories from the first section, then this would be the book that's perfectly catered to me.

[Mack · Rating 5 out of 5]

i don’t care if it’s redundant i’m just always going to give zambreno five stars. she lights up my world

[Mind the Book · Rating 5 out of 5]

Det här var min första sommarledighetsbok och den brukar jag känna starkt för. I stort sett är det här en parad med alla mina popkulturella passioner, även mer obskyra 'obsessions' - för att använda författarens beskrivning av bokens innehåll - ur konsten och litteraturen.

Kanske inte vurmar för Warhol lika mycket som Zambreno gör, men väl Cy Twombly, Jean Seberg, Patty Hearst, Jean Rhys, Plath och Pessoa m.fl. Känner mig så lycklig när Zambreno från djupet av sitt "archive of loneliness and longing" skriver om Wojnarowiczs Rimbaud-foton i New York, hemmafrufilmen om Jeanne Dielman, den franska livskris-soffalkis-sångscenen från Broadcast News eller stilinspo från Meg Ryans utväxt blonderings-biker-look från Addicted to Love. De två senare tillhör saker man nästan glömt. Zambreno är en soulmate, sans doute.

[Delia Rainey · Rating 4 out of 5]

a little gossipy which i love. full of references of her obsessions with writers and old movie-stars (which if u read kate zambreno a lot, you already know them) and quick memories that come and go. i have a soft spot for that chapter about her dad watching john wayne movies on his tv. funny, i had just finished 'airless spaces' by shulamith firestone and 'close to the knives' by david wojnarowicz before reading this. and yeah i've read 'suite for barbara loden', but zambreno's last essay on 'wanda' was def the most stunning chapter. in my opinion, kate zambreno could write a whole book about living in wicker park chicago in her early 20s, i would devour it.

[Olivia]

if this had been just the essays, five stars 1 billion percent. i still really enjoyed the short "stories" - screen tests? - that made up the first part but i think that kate zambreno really shines when she has more room to meander and make connections. i appreciated the cross-story connections, but i think her rambling, associative writing to me works best longer form. i am such a fan of the way she writes and i always get so many good books to read from her writing. excited to read the autofic about foucault for instance. but anyway, i love the way she writes about her obsessions with media, it makes me feel like there is a place for that in writing and i appreciate that because i also feel like i am made of my obsessions

[⋆.˚ livia .☘︎ ݁˖ · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading kate zambreno essays and short stories as a writer myself is always like being thrown into a cool pool only to realize that the water is the same temperature as your body. maybe that’s a cheesy comparison but it’s the easiest one i can think of, i adore the feeling of reading about her obsessions as well as her depression and her fears because often enough the emotions in her writing mirror my own at any given moment.

[Till Raether · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

I feel like the longer essays sometimes fall flat with their formal pretensions (no, a paragraph is not a photograph), and the texts which have no conclusion are much better than the ones that do. I very much liked the personal stories about not really needing to be present, successful, or visible. Also the fact that the book is interested in both Warhol and Solanas.

[Monika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wish that every interesting author living an intense intellectual life would share a glimpse into it with the readers, allowing us to have an illusion that we're part of it. Bridging different contexts and artists, Zambreno shows that she's a generous author. In Screen Tests, she weaves a meaningful nexus on creating, art and female talent that holds a lot of power.

[Luna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Kate Zambreno’s writing so much but reading this made me realize how little art I’ve seen/how little I know!! Many of these essays were funny observations about life as a writer or woman or mother, others were bigger, harder reflections on those same roles (and the way other artists have filled them). Excited to read more of her work!

[Darci Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the final two essays “New York City, Summer 2013” and “One Can Be Dumb and Unhappy at Exactly the Same Time” (true)

[Jessica Rose · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretentious shite. Genuinely a struggle to get through this despite how short each chapter is. Had to stop at 49% and go stress-eat some carbs before I could dredge up the will to continue. If I ever see another navel-gazing ramble about Andy Warhol or Edie Sedgwick or literally any other white hipster icon I will throw myself under a bus. Imagine that a middle-class White Feminist with a degree in gender studies buys a shop in a run-down neighbourhood, converts it into a gluten-free bistro, and invites all their annoying middle-class uni-educated friends over for a movie-themed brunch. This book is what you'd find on the the tables instead of a menu.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kate Zambreno writes essays that make me: scramble to find a pencil (or pen?!) to underline, yelp in recognition, and pause to collect myself. In other words- the best kind.

Topics covered I could read another thousand pages on: Anne Collier's photographs, angry women writers, Elia Kazan and Barbara Loden, contradictory thoughts on Sontag, and female beauty + genius.

[Marina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book makes me feel like:
A) the intellectual white ladies currently gentrifying the neighbourhood I grew up in
B) like I am reading the inner workings of my writer brain.

The “Stories” in the first section we’re definitely my favourite part. The Essays were fine for context but I mean......this is not a book that needed context.

[Joseph Dubey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really my cup of tea. I hate to say anything bad about a book because there are plenty of people out there that will enjoy this book, so i won't. Pick it up and start reading it, you might like it.

[Karolina I-ska · Rating 2 out of 5]

I get it: Kate Zambreno can name drop all intellectuals who smoked and suddently - spoiler alert - reveal that Thomas Bernhard was not one of them. There were a few interesting thoughts there but otherwise: pretentious and utterly boring.

[Zoe]

kate zambreno is weird and annoying, i really like her.

when i started this book i was so annoyed at all the name dropping and references to references to references to things i did not know about but then i realized she was writing this for herself and that is kind of an amazing thing, to map out your constellation of obsessions, your canon, to delve into it as you want. and that is your art. then i revised this realization because i think she is also writing for her friends. it's like one long email chain. and her friends are m and s and all the other people she is directly corresponding with and engaging with in her writing life..but also the people she is obsessed with, the ones she is essaying with, marilyn monroe kathy acker susan sontag wittgenstein etc. etc. i realized this second realization as i was reading because i was like why is she recounting all these movie plots and matryoshka doll like interwoven references to me dear god, but then—it's just like when you're on the phone with a friend or on a walk and they're telling you about the movie or book they loved, and they are loving it more deeply as they describe and dissect it, and they are loving you more deeply because they are sharing it, this thing they loved, and your universe is expanding to hold this thing under your shared attention. it's really intimate. and contextual to zambreno's lived relationships, to a degree, which makes me think of camille roy explicitly talking about writing for her community. i don't think that's what kate zambreno is doing, she's really doing her own thing, and a wider audience is definitely welcomed in, especially in the essays, but it does feel relevant, especially in the context of her conflicted relationship to authorship and notoriety.

i also love this book because of her yearning and longing to be a literary hermit. she is a great role model of a literary hermit for me. eating bagels with cream cheese on the couch and watching interviews of her obsessions on youtube. with all her books around her. she feels bad about it and like a failure and yet this is her life she loves it in some way (?)and she is so deeply in her mind and her textual universe. i love that one line where she describes going outside to the backyard in just her underwear and her shirt in the heat and looking at the tops of the pine trees. also when she describes the praxis of being disgusting in public, her black fingernail polish growing out. but back to the books around her..especially the "stories" in this collection make me think of a commonplace book. really the two sections of stories and essays feel incredibly separate and gave me different things to think about. but yes the stories felt like failed lydia davis esque experiments and i liked best to read them as bits from a journal, bits of a life, fragments which she loves to talk about. she is always questioning herself but i never distrusted her, this is an incredible achievement i think. i want to read her novels now, her earlier stuff. thanks kate i feel so tender towards you

[Glen Helfand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Screen has multiple meanings. Zambreno's book, of course, invokes Andy Warhol's droll experiments with cinema, but the screen is also something blank, like a canvas. Her computer screen that shifts between writing and YouTube rabbit holes. There is also the kind of screen that filters, keeps the bugs out (though fleas at one point attack the writer's dog, Genet), but don't keep out the atmosphere. The very compact stories are like phone screens, hand held pictures captured at unexpected moments, with barely there narratives. They feel true to life, autobiographical. They are about writers, women, the horror of having one's author photo taken. Zambreno, in the essays, alternates fiction and fact, the lives of film stars, writers, artists (Louise Brooks, Frances Farmer, Barbara Loden, Kathy Acker, Valerie Solanas, Meg Ryan) and people from her past, all of whom have faced difficult transitions and untimely ends. These pieces seem effortless, yet full of struggle-- a dynamic juxtaposition.

[Samir De Leon · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Screen Tests" is a work inspired most noticeably by the work of Annie Ernaux and David Markson, the latter of whom is referenced often through the book, although Zambreno's stories are mediated largely through the histories of (mostly) women in (mostly) 20th century film. Zambreno's vignettes are fragmented and occasionally too pithy, perhaps, but the book coalesces neatly around central themes of identity (especifically the instability of the first person pronoun), the artifice of character, the visual and spiritual rhetoric of photography, and the artist's resentment (of other artists, of their subjects, of institutions, of themselves, etc.). "Blanchot in a Supermarket Parking Lot" is one of the best ekphrastic pieces I've read this year.

Zambreno is a talented writer who is probably more in her element as a creative nonfiction writer, but her fiction needs to be taken seriously, too.

[Joel Pelanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whatta writer Kate Zambreno is. I read Heroines an loved it, and this collection is similar in tone - centered loosely on the idea of failure, and the obstacles placed in front of female artistic and literary success by a patriarchal society. The final essay in particular is equal parts crushing and hopeful and uplifting.

Zambreno is also very FUNNY. There's bravery to her work, in that she is seems terrified of sounding stupid or revealing herself too much but does so anyway - which creates incredibly and uniquely relatable moments, especially if you're the sort of person who feels the need to "do well" in therapy sessions. Additionally, as someone who champions other writers and artists, Zambreno ends up giving you a wonderful list of women to read / watch / listen to afterwards. I liked it!

[Hugh]

Everyone
is equally important. Secondary
sources terterary sources,
small opinions, large critiques,
(well perhaps only a couple)
while carrying a child,
mother-in-laws and
Elena Ferrante recommendations.
Languid & languishing,
moment upon moment,
the baby loves Andy Warhol's book,
etc. and a plus, a detail in Valerie
(SCUM manifesto) Solanas' biography.
Bricolage may be a most
important word, here.
Wittgenstein's Mistress?
"Otherwise, I would have
become like Wanda, all my
life just floating around."
The last third gets more real,
fascination giving way to
rumination on memories
of her friend, her friend,
-turns out rising out of
precarity is the unnamed
nemesis. The muck.
The wall. The cloud
that floats across an
empty sky when
not working as a waitress
and remembering her
coworkers for us.