Screen Tests / Undying
This review was first published in the Fall 2019 issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books . Anne Boyer's The Undying went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. (I have kept the page references in my text that are provided for the Rain Taxi copyeditors, but which are cut from the printed version.) This review in many ways intersects with my later essays on Zambreno's Drifts and Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts , parts of something I've been thinking of as "the asterisks project". What will come of it, I don't know, but it is ongoing, in fits and starts (more fits than starts these days, but c'est la vie). Screen Tests Kate Zambreno Harper Perennial ($16.99) The Undying Anne Boyer Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($26.00) reviewed by Matthew Cheney In Screen Tests , a collection of prose pieces, Kate Zambreno says that she writes to “announce to myself, as well as to the drifts of former intimates that amass into one giant coronary heartbreak, t
