The Light Room

Early reviews called this book a miracle between two covers. In The Light Room, Zambreno writes about the intersections of catastrophes that unfold on a global scale . . . Zambreno writes with a sense of hope that will especially resonate with anyone who's soldiered through pandemic-era parenting

When Kate Zambreno writes she must use a special microscope, with which she studies the dust in the sunlight, and the clutter of motherhood, and the thinnest fibers of exhaustion and hope. The Light Room is a miracle, a wooden box with a golden clasp filled with the specimens of all our most precious, disappearing days

Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup

One of the great uncategorizable writers of our time

The Light Room is both a gift and a beacon

Elegant. . . . This is a book about the aloneness of motherhood - the limits of maternal attention, the dissolution of self, the mind-numbing tedium of raising small children - [and] a book about a "life inside" - not just inside the home, but inside the mind. . . . It may be among the most lasting literature of Covid, a lightbox for the future: the story of a mother looking for brightness in a diary of dark days

One of our most formally ambitious writers

Kate Zambreno has performed a miracle, capturing real, lived time from within the exhaustion of pandemic-era parenthood. The Light Room reminded me of that fundamental magic of writing-that the details of another person's life, so precisely and honestly rendered, can instantly loosen the edges of your own life and make you feel less alone