Heroines

“It’s kind of a book of utterances … it’s beautiful and I love it.”
—Kristen Stewart

“The book is startlingly insightful.”
—Jezebel.com

“Issues a powerful clarion call for a supportive community of female writers who will fixate on their own experiences without shame and reject the ‘measuring rod’ of the ‘Great American (Male) Novelist.’”
—Publishers Weekly

“I was reading your book intensely for days and people started asking, ‘Ok ok, what is this book?’ What is this book you are so enraptured by? And I said, ‘Well, it’s a book I’ve been waiting for a long time.’ I am very excited it exists.”
—Mary Borkowski, The New Inquiry

“With equal parts unabashed pathos and exceptional intelligence, Heroines foregrounds female subjectivity to produce an impressive and original work that examines the suppression of various female modernists in relation to Zambreno’s own complicated position as a writer and a wife.”
—Christopher Higgs, The Paris Review Online

“A lush, lyrical feminist memoir.”
—Laurie Penny, The New Statesman

“I’m hard-pressed to think of a book I’ve read this year that obsessed me more in the moment, rippled out as much into my daily life and conversations, or left more powerful aftershocks.”
—Gina Frangello, The Rumpus

“Heroines reads with an almost physical urgency, as though written in a hot, hot heat.”
—Martha Bayne, Chicago Reader

“Heroines is part literary criticism, part literary history, part memoir, part feminist polemic.”
—Subashini Navaratnam, Popmatters

“The book sizzles with combative, confessional wit as she deconstructs the toxic strategies that Anglo-US culture uses to dismiss or erase ‘the girl writing’. Brilliant and groundbreaking.”
—David Kennedy, Times Higher Education

“The writing in Heroines is sharp, visceral, self-avowedly furious, often brilliant…”
—Jerome Boyd Maunsell, Times Literary Supplement

“Zambreno doesn’t write with the measured voice of someone who can count on being listened to, but with the wail of someone confined to a shed.”
—Sheila Heti, London Review of Books

“Heroines is rigorous and confident, fiercely intelligent in its demand for a fairer way of reading, writing and writing about women—past, present and future.”
—Juliet Jacques, New Statesman

Kate Zambreno is the author of many books, most recently The Light Room and Tone, a collaboration with Sofia Samatar. At Semiotext(e) Zambreno published Heroines, Book of Mutter, and Appendix Project. Forthcoming from Semiotext(e) in 2025 and 2026 are two novels-Foam and Performance Art. They are a 2021 Guggenheim Nonfiction Fellow. Currently Zambreno teaches graduate writing at Columbia University and is a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at NYU.

Jamie Hood is a poet, memoirist, and critic. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Vogue, Bookforum, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.