Meghan Racklin
Kate Zambreno’s The Light Room
By Meghan Racklin“Our toddler is now at an age where she’s likely to feel a sensitivity to Small Objects,” Kate Zambreno writes in The Light Room, her new memoir about caring for her two small daughters early in the COVID pandemic and amidst the ongoing disaster of climate change. With schools shut down, she develops an obsession with child development and progressive education methods—it is from Maria Montessori that she learns that children go through many “Sensitivity Periods.”
Anne Serre’s A Leopard-Skin Hat
By Meghan RacklinAnne Serre, the story goes, wrote her first novel in an effort to seduce a teacher of hers—whether this is true or just a tale she likes to tell is somewhat beside the point, this being the perfect creation myth for a writer supremely attuned to the things fiction can and cannot accomplish. A Leopard-Skin Hat, the fourth book by Serre to be translated into English by Mark Hutchinson, is, like Serre’s other work, exuberantly anti-realist and avowedly fictional.
