possibly obligatory, totally self-involved post

 So I'm starting to *think* about a tour for Heroines in the fall (official pub date in November, but the books will be available for readings beginning September I think). I've started to contact a handful of people I know in writing programs in universities (teaching or attending). I really want to read at universities, because the book is so much about writing today, as well as how we're haunted by the myths and ideologies of modernism. Anyway. If you are at a university, a writing program or WGS program, and your university has some sort of reading series, and you think they might dig me - please contact them! recommend me! or contact me and tell me to contact them!

You can contact me at francesfarmerismysister@gmail.com

Thanks loves! Also let me know if you'd be interested in interviewing me about the book, or reviewing the book for a publication.

Here's Maggie Nelson's blurb:

"If you thought you knew a lot about the 'wives' of modernism and the various forms of silencing they suffered, Kate Zambreno's HEROINES will teach you more; if you didn't know much, your mouth will fall open in enraged amazement. Zambreno admirably transforms copious research and personal experience into vernacular knowledge, then heats up the brew into a justified rant about dynamics that may have shape-shifted over the past 100 years but have (sadly) not disappeared. Bravo."

-- Maggie Nelson, author of BLUETS and THE ART OF CRUELTY.

Here's the MIT Press catalogue copy, written by my editor Chris Kraus (the blog is mentioned! some of you who comment regularly are actually in the book!):

HEROINES by Kate Zambreno
XXX pages, paper, pub date November 2012

On the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called FRANCES FARMER IS MY SISTER.  She was obsessed with the female modernists, and living in Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job.  Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses" - reclaiming the consistently pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys and Zelda Fitzgerald - writers and artists themselves who served as muses only to end their lives silenced, erased and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, FRANCES FARMER helped create a community where today's "toxic girls" devised a new feminist discourse, writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.
       In HEROINES, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship.  Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be, and who is allowed to write it, from  T.S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of mid-century intellectuals like Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the Second Wave of feminism, she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the "minor" and names and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. "ANXIETY:", writes Zambreno, "When she experiences it, it's pathological.  When he does, it's existential."  By advancing the Girl-As-Philosopher, Zambreno re-invents feminism for her generation while providing a model for a newly subjectivized criticism.