An "intimate, fiercely intelligent, and reliably provocative" (Refinery 29) novel of creative obsession by the influential, innovative author of Green Girl and Heroines

"Zambreno has been putting out smart, underrecognized novels for a decade," wrote Vulture in naming Drifts one of their Best Books of 2020. "She ought to be Rachel Cusk'd."

Haunting and compulsively readable, 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, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rilke, Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances-the comings and goings of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment-leaves her unsettled…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.

Story Locale: New York City; Europe