Green Girl

By Kate Zambreno
(Emergency Press, Paperback, 9780983022633, 268pp.)

Publication Date: October 18, 2011

Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook

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Kate Zambreno is the author of the novel O Fallen Angel (Chiasmus Press). Her blog, Frances Farmer Is My Sister, has partially inspired a book of literary essays to be published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents Series in spring, 2012. She is the prose editor at Nightboat Books, and a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative.

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Named a best book of 2011 by Roxane Gay and Dennis Cooper.

Chosen as a finalist for The Morning News 2012 Tournament of Books.

The book is by turns bildungsroman, sociological study, deconstruction,
polemic, and live-streamed dialogue with Jean Rhys, Clarice Lispector,
Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, the Bible, Roland Barthes, and most of
Western European modernism by way of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.
Green Girl is ambitious in a way few works of fiction are, and it’s
certainly more ambitious than the kind of fiction Zambreno is taking on:
the single-girl-seeking-not-sure-what-exactly novel that has been
pigeonholed as “chick lit” at least since Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s
Diary, which Green Girl draws from (its cosmopolitan London setting) and
pitches against (its implied self-definition through romance). —
Bookforum, James Greer

Zambreno’s wickedly compassionate lenses seems to be not only a kind of
wonderful novel of self-exploration and awakening, but a much needed tap
on the face to remember where we are and how what comes out of us both is
of us and mirrored off of those we touch. HTML Giant, Blake Butler

Meet Ruth. She’s a little lost, a little feeble, a little unsteady on her
feet. She is what Kate Zambreno, her creator, calls a Green Girl, a girl
suffering through her own becoming. She is an American lost in London,
working at a department store she bitterly calls Horrids, trying to force
a perfume called Desire on American tourists. You might not expect such a
girl to keep the company of Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Joseph
Cornell and John Keats, but in Zambreno’s world she does. Writers and
filmmakers and philosophers weave in and out of her tale of one girl in
danger of being gobbled by the big city. Her life might seem a little
mundane, with the toing and froing on the London Underground, the dreary
retail job, the boy problems and the girl problems and the hair problems.
But the book is anything but. It cracks, it zings. It makes you call your
girlfriend and read sections aloud over the phone. Kirkus Reviews, Jessa
Crispin

Zambreno's cruelty is only the world’s, the world that has provided for
girls like Ruth endless dead-end heroines, beauties who, if they do
anything at all, mostly undo. Bookslut, Lightsey Darst