The Light Room: On Art and Care

"Kate Zambreno is a true writers’ writer; her books are always being recommended to me by other authors. (Most recently, the novelist Catherine Lacey told me that Zambreno’s Screen Tests is “a perfect book.”) Her latest, The Light Room , is billed as “a candid chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty.” Annie Ernaux herself offered an endorsement, enthusing that Zambreno “has invented a new form,” comprising “a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup.” That absolute present is a meditation on parenting, on the quiet joys of maintenance, and what Zambreno terms “life inside”—that is, both of being cooped up in the house during the pandemic, and interiority in that other sense. The life of the mind finds intellectual trapdoors that can relieve the tedium. Speaking to Lithub recently, Zambreno explained that she hopes the book will be “a balm for others, a space of joy as well as exhaustion and deep sadness, a space to think with.” The US poet Maggie Smith—whose bittersweet poem ‘Good Bones’ went viral several years ago, making Smith an overnight sensation—has released a memoir charting the disintegration of her marriage. (Its title, You Could Make This Place Beautiful , is a line from that poem.) Smith’s fans tend towards the devotional, but I do have the sense that this particular book has been unusually polarising. You’ll either love it and find its aphoristic style and motivational tone inspiring, or you’ll find it somewhat trying . Probably that description in itself will be enough to indicate which will be the case in your instance. Another social media darling, Oliver Darkshire—whose unexpectedly riotous helming of the Sotheran’s antiquarian bookshop Twitter account found an avid online audience—has published Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller . Sotheran’s, on London’s Sackville Street, is one of the world’s oldest bookshops, and is by all accounts a charmingly eccentric establishment, with a resident ghost, cursed books, and a byzantine cataloguing system. Darkshire’s whimsical and humorous account of his apprenticeship in this storied, somewhat shadowy, institution is a lot of fun. If you’re on the fence, Lithub has published an extract ."