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Drifts
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 7 hrs and 13 mins
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Publisher's summary
“Drifts is a dazzling and enjoyable book. Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup. I've never read truer pages on the subject of pregnancy. No writer has come so close to achieving a total grasp of life: the entanglement of everyday things, a writing project, and a pregnant body, in a single work.”—Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Paris Review, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Vulture, and Refinery29
“Reading all Zambreno feels like the jolt one gets from a surprise cut or burn in the kitchen, that sudden recognition that you’re in a body and the body can be hurt.”—Alicia Kennedy, Refinery29
Haunting and compulsively enjoyable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances—the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment—leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything.
A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.
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“[Drifts] captures the fitful stops, starts, shame, joy, and boredom that go into creating a work of art.”—The Paris Review
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Story
When Abigail Thomas’s husband, Rich, was hit by a car, his brain shattered. Subject to rages, terrors, and hallucinations, he must live the rest of his life in an institution. He has no memory of what he did the hour, the day, the year before. This tragedy is the ground on which Abigail had to build a new life. How she built that life is a story of great courage and great change, of moving to a small country town, of a new family composed of three dogs, knitting, and friendship, of facing down guilt and discovering gratitude.
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Eloquent & Honest
- By Sara on 09-30-15
By: Abigail Thomas
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Reading My Father
- A Memoir
- By: Alexandra Styron
- Narrated by: Alexandra Styron
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexandra Styron's parents—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written with humor, compassion, and grace.
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William Styron Ranks...
- By Douglas on 12-22-13
By: Alexandra Styron
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The Unspeakable
- And Other Subjects of Discussion
- By: Meghan Daum
- Narrated by: Meghan Daum
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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It's a report tempered by hard times. In "Matricide", Daum unflinchingly describes a parent's death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in "Diary of a Coma" she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital.
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Complaining about her dead mom.
- By Erik Hermansen on 11-23-14
By: Meghan Daum
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Your Voice in My Head
- A Memoir
- By: Emma Forrest
- Narrated by: Emma Forrest
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Emma Forrest, a British journalist, was just 22 and living the fast life in New York City when she realized that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity. In a cycle of loneliness, damaging relationships, and destructive behavior, she found herself in the chair of a slim, balding, and effortlessly optimistic psychiatrist--a man whose wisdom and humanity would wrench her from the dangerous tide after she tried to end her life.
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Great, quick read
- By Amazon Customer on 02-12-21
By: Emma Forrest
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Dog Years
- By: Mark Doty
- Narrated by: Mark Doty
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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When Mark Doty went looking to adopt a small dog, a cuddly creature who might comfort his terminally ill partner, Wally Roberts, he was surprised to find himself returning home from an animal shelter with a full-grown golden retriever, a dog whose "absolute openess of regard", and paw gently offered through the bars of a cage, proved irresistable to him.
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I cried my face off
- By Brad on 10-27-08
By: Mark Doty
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The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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The Wife
- A Novel
- By: Meg Wolitzer
- Narrated by: Dawn Harvey
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The moment Joan Castleman decides to leave her husband, they are 35,000 feet above the ocean on a flight to Helsinki. Joan's husband, Joseph, is one of America's preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award, and Joan, who has spent 40 years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, has finally decided to stop.
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A bit of a downer
- By Jody Cox on 08-01-18
By: Meg Wolitzer
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This Close to Happy
- A Reckoning with Depression
- By: Daphne Merkin
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction.
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I should be the last person to recommend this book
- By Mariaposa on 03-04-17
By: Daphne Merkin
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Pages for You
- The Pages for You Series, Book 1
- By: Sylvia Brownrigg
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
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In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The 17-year-old, new to everything around her - college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life - is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her.
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A gorgeous listen
- By MissLynn on 03-09-20
By: Sylvia Brownrigg
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Lady Oracle
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Lorelei King
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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From fat girl to thin, from red hair to mud brown, from London to Toronto, from Polish count to radical husband - Joan Foster is utterly confused by her life of multiple identities. She decides to escape to an Italian hill town to take stock of her life. But first, she must organize her own death.
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A Feminist Romp
- By annkpowers on 07-02-22
By: Margaret Atwood
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Happening
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 1 hr and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep the child. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days.
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Heartbreaking
- By Lynn Thompson on 05-19-23
By: Annie Ernaux
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Last Evenings on Earth
- By: Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: David Crommett
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile", as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime.
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Solid Character based Stories
- By Michael on 06-06-24
By: Roberto Bolano, and others
What listeners say about Drifts
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Fast and curious
- 05-14-24
Ok …
I bought this book a while ago when I was fixated with The New Yorker stories, where I think it was promoted. Zambreno writes visually - I could certainly see all she was describing: the state of pregnancy, the link to other writers and those in her close proximity, but because of the very melancholy topics it kept resting upon, time and time again - I found it depressing, hence it taking me 3 years on and off to complete, and I’m a keen lover of literature and reader. As always, (or perhaps at the time when it was written) the victim approach, feeling sorry for oneself, is flagged and applauded. Come back Jane Austen, Ian McEwan and Sandra Cisneros, to name a few, canonical works which, not only tell tales, but leave something laaaasting, as I say in my short story collection ‘OUR FOREIGN BORDERs’, Amazon. I gave ‘Drifts’, nonetheless, 4 stars, because, as an author, I now what it means/takes to complete a book. You can find my books on Amazon. Xx
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- Joselo
- 06-08-20
It's the little things that count.
In her autofiction novel 'Drifts', Kate Zambreno writes in a very casual, contemplative style, about the frustration and isolation involved in the process of giving birth to a work of art. She candidly blends in her story the banal and the deeply personal, all of which forms part of her everyday experience. When a well-established author and colleague asks her what sort of work she writes, she can think of nothing better than to answer, "Prose, little things..." She comments on the lives of other artists, like the celebrated feminist filmmaker Chantal Akerman, whose masterpiece shows a woman performing the most mundane acts, or of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his monastic habits, on how he once asked the sculptor Auguste Rodin about "how to find the quiet space inside himself within from which to work". She repeatedly returns to certain works of art, like Albrecht Dürer's 'Melencolia I', an engraving of a gloomy female angel, who is perhaps waiting for inspiration. Indeed, melancholia figures prominently in this narrative. She struggles with the approaching deadline for her book, which she keeps postponing. At times, she seems trapped in her circumstances, like a character dreamed up by Kafka, whom she also writes about. But she keeps treading forward, like the professional writer that she is. She sometimes seems affected by all the duties that she's expected to perform. "Lately, I've been fixing my students' writing problems in my sleep." As she gestates her work of literature, she also becomes pregnant with a baby. Her body changes and so does her relationship with the world around her. It takes courage both to be an artist and to bring a person into this world. She counts with the company of her husband (and of her trusty sidekick, her dog Jeunet), but one can see that it can get tough. Rather than become paralyzed with the challenges that she faces, both emotional and practical, she takes that raw material and makes art with it, which feels alive and relevant.
Narrator Cassandra Campbell's reading has an appropriate ring of cosmopolitan sophistication and intimacy.
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