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Green Girl    Kate Zambreno    fall, 2011

Green Girl is The Bell Jar for today—an existential novel about Ruth, a young American in London, kin to Jean Seberg gamines and contemporary celebutantes. Ruth works a string of meaningless jobs: perfume spritzer at a department store she calls Horrids, clothes-folder, and a shopgirl at a sex shop. Ruth is looked at constantly—something she craves and abhors. She is followed by a mysterious narrator, the voice equally violent and maternal. Ruth and her toxic friend, Agnes, are obsessed with cosmetics and fashion and film, with boys, with themselves, and with each other. Green Girl is about that important and frightening and exhilarating period of being adrift and screwing up, a time when drunken hook-ups and infatuations, nervous breakdowns, and ecstatic epiphanies are the order of the day.

"I can’t recall the last time I read a book whose heroine infuriated and seduced me as completely as Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl...The skill with which Zambreno inhabits the emptiness of her all-too-recognizable, self-obsessed heroine, clinging to her persona as it turns to dust in her hands, is remarkable."

                                  — Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair

Kate Zambreno is the author of the novel O Fallen Angel (Chiasmus Press). A book of essays centering around the women of modernism, Heroines, will be published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series in fall, 2012.

Zambreno writes the blog, Frances Farmer is My Sister.

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