Against Nonfiction (Writing Through Capitalist Realisms)

A manifesto in lectures about the material conditions and absurdities of being a writer and adjunct professor under capitalism—by turns funny, angry, despairing, and hopeful—from a writer who “has invented a new form” (Annie Ernaux).

In the spring of 2025, Heroines and Drifts author Kate Zambreno taught a weeklong nonfiction “craft” lecture at Columbia University, thinking through the crises of the adjunct loop in the United States and the question of labor and writing in publishing and the university. This project became more absurd, and more urgent, as the Trump administration quickly turned to authoritarianism and the university became complicit with the administration, creating a dystopian and paranoid atmosphere in which students were kidnapped from university housing and student protestors were expelled. How can we study together and create under such conditions?

The resulting essays are funny, angry, often in despair, and somehow also full of optimism as to the future of writing, even amidst the collapse of the institutions meant to support writers and students. Zambreno engages with texts including Sofia Samatar’s Opacities, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, Noémi Lefebvre’s The Poetics of Work, Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, and Samuel Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

A craft book against a “craft” divorced from political and material realities, Against Nonfiction is for anyone trying to write and make art in impossible times.