Against Nonfiction: Writing Through Capitalist Realisms
May 2027 · Haymarket Books
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About this ebook
A manifesto in lectures about the material conditions and absurdities of being a writer and adjunct professor under capitalism—by turns funny, angry, despairing, and hopeful—from a writer who “has invented a new form” (Annie Ernaux).
In the spring of 2025, Heroines and Drifts author Kate Zambreno taught a weekly nonfiction “craft” lecture at Columbia University, thinking through the crises of the adjunct loop in the United States and the question of labor and writing in publishing and the university. This project became more absurd, and more urgent, as the Trump administration quickly turned to authoritarianism and the university became complicit with the administration, creating a dystopian and paranoid atmosphere in which students were kidnapped from university housing and student protestors were expelled. How can we study together and create under such conditions?
The resulting essays are funny, angry, often in despair, and somehow also full of optimism as to the future of writing, even amidst the collapse of the institutions meant to support writers and students. Zambreno engages with texts including Sofia Samatar’s Opacities, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, Noémi Lefebvre’s The Poetics of Work, Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, and Samuel Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.
A craft book against a “craft” divorced from political and material realities, Against Nonfiction is for anyone trying to write and make art in impossible times.
In the spring of 2025, Heroines and Drifts author Kate Zambreno taught a weekly nonfiction “craft” lecture at Columbia University, thinking through the crises of the adjunct loop in the United States and the question of labor and writing in publishing and the university. This project became more absurd, and more urgent, as the Trump administration quickly turned to authoritarianism and the university became complicit with the administration, creating a dystopian and paranoid atmosphere in which students were kidnapped from university housing and student protestors were expelled. How can we study together and create under such conditions?
The resulting essays are funny, angry, often in despair, and somehow also full of optimism as to the future of writing, even amidst the collapse of the institutions meant to support writers and students. Zambreno engages with texts including Sofia Samatar’s Opacities, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, Noémi Lefebvre’s The Poetics of Work, Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, and Samuel Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.
A craft book against a “craft” divorced from political and material realities, Against Nonfiction is for anyone trying to write and make art in impossible times.
A manifesto in lectures about the material conditions and absurdities of being a writer and adjunct professor under capitalism—by turns funny, angry, despairing, and hopeful—from a writer who “has invented a new form” (Annie Ernaux).
In the spring of 2025, Heroines and Drifts author Kate Zambre...
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About the author
Kate Zambreno is the author of more than ten books that confound genre and think through endurance and duration—variously novels, speculative essays and reports, performative lectures—including Drifts, Appendix Project, To Write as if Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert, The Light Room, and Animal Stories. They also co-authored, with Sofia Samatar, a work of experimental criticism, Tone. Forthcoming in Fall 2026 and Fall 2027 from Semiotext(e) are two novels of interiority and precarity, Foam and Performance Art. They are a doctoral student in Performance Studies at NYU. They live in Brooklyn.
Kate Zambreno is the author of more than ten books that confound genre and think through endurance and duration—variously novels, speculative essays and reports, performative lectures—including Drifts, Appendix Project, To Write as if Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert, The Light Room, and An...
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