Green Girl: A Novel

“I can’t recall the last time I read a book whose heroine infuriated and seduced me as completely as Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl.” —Vanity Fair

“Searing . . . Green Girl reveals the intimate awareness many women have about the ways they are on display when they move in public, about the ways they perform their roles as women.” —Roxane Gay

A beloved indie darling, now revised and updated, including an extensive P.S. section with never-before-published outtakes, and a new essay and interview with the author

First published in 2011 by a small press, Green Girl was quickly named one of the best books of the year. With the fierce emotional and intellectual power of such classics as Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star, Kate Zambreno's novel Green Girl is a provocative, sharply etched portrait of a young woman navigating the spectrum between anomie and epiphany.

Zambreno's heroine, Ruth, is a young American in London, kin to Jean Seberg gamines and contemporary celebutantes, by day spritzing perfume at the department store she calls Horrids, by night trying desperately to navigate a world colored by the unwanted gaze of others and the uncertainty of her own self-regard.

Ruth, the "green girl," joins the canon of young people existing in that important, frightening, and exhilarating period of drift and anxiety between youth and adulthood, and her story is told through the eyes of one of the most surprising and unforgettable narrators in recent fiction—a voice at once distanced and maternal, indulgent yet blackly funny. And the result is a piercing yet humane meditation on alienation, consumerism, the city, self-awareness, and desire, by a novelist who has been compared with Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Elfriede Jelinek.

“If you were ever a green girl, you will recognize yourself on page after page.” - Lightsey Darst, Bookslut

“It cracks, it zings. It makes you call your girlfriend and read sections aloud over the phone.” - Kirkus Reviews

“The young woman’s existential novel for the new millennium. The book is smart, experimental, and just a little bit dangerous . . . It’s a must-read for anyone who’s ever wanted a 21st century update to the Bell Jar. . . Reading it will resonate.” - Bustle

“An ambitious synthesis of millennial identity crisis, lyrical experimentation and emotional self-destruction. . . . Zambreno has the writing chops for this unconventional journey.” - Kirkus Reviews

“…a fresh and important new voice in literature… Ambitious but difficult to pin down, smart, stylish, and filled with supercharged prose that pulsed with the searing intensity few writers could maintain throughout an entire book...” - Flavorwire

“A deeply character-driven book, Green Girl allows its narrator to insert herself with pity, scorn or deliberate self-recognition, as though a god watching her creating crawl fitfully through the city streets. It’s this beautiful erosion of perspective and identity that truly illuminates the empathetic specimen of humanity at stake: Ruth, green girl extraordinaire, becomes the narrator, becomes Zambreno, maybe even becomes the reader, as if threatening to swallow the world with her reckless naiveté.” - Shelf Awareness

“A deeply character-driven book, Green Girl allows its narrator to insert herself with pity, scorn or deliberate self-recognition, as though a god watching her creating crawl fitfully through the city streets... - Shelf Awareness

“Zambreno’s novel unfolds with a filmic quality, of scenes playing out with lyric intensity.” - The Millions

“…the everyday experiences of commodities and feelings we take for granted... are masterfully unsettled by Zambreno, made violent and oppressive and caustic… This is an ultimately hopeful, optimistic book , especially for the girls like Ruth who are regularly represented as static, no-hope, stock creatures… Green Girl purposefully ruptures the genres to which it owes much of its feelings and themes by existing and prodding inside of it, unveiling the crushing pressures of everyday existence not only for green girls, but for any and all who feel they have to toe the line, and the powerful possibilities beyond it. This is Zambreno in high form, unrelenting in her emotional sincerity and intellectual acuity, a necessary voice in a still green world.” - Berfrois

“This is Zambreno in high form, unrelenting in her emotional sincerity and intellectual acuity, a necessary voice in a still green world.” - Berfrois

“Zambreno’s Ruth is literature’s lost girl. . . A harrowing, brilliant book.” - Kate Durbin

“Not since Faulkner first arrested my heart and stole my breath in The Sound and the Fury have I been as ravaged by the language of a novel as in Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl. There is a poetics of desire shivering in the skin of every line. There is a momentous psychosexual arrival in her deformations of diction and syntax—as if language itself were intimate with the body of a girl. Read this book if you dare the wrath of signification: ‘She throws herself into the crowd . . . The ecstasy of commotion . . . and scream.’” - Lidia Yuknavitch

“Not since Faulkner first arrested my heart and stole my breath in The Sound and the Fury have I been as ravaged by the language of a novel as in Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl.” - Lidia Yuknavitch

“…elegant, crystalline, eminently readable… The novel recreates the agonizing experience of becoming oneself, recognizing with growing anxiety one’s smallness and powerlessness within a disappointing and unjust world. It’s dissatisfying, it’s maddening, it’s impossibly irritating; everything gets under the skin, and there is no adequate, or individualized, response—except maybe a scream.” - L.A. Review of Books

“…elegant, crystalline, eminently readable…” - L.A. Review of Books

“…a fresh and important new voice in literature… Ambitious but difficult to pin down, smart, stylish, and filled with supercharged prose that pulsed with the searing intensity few writers could maintain throughout an entire book, Green Girl (as well as Heroines) announced Zambreno as a writer who would be impossible to ignore.” - Flavorwire

“The best word to describe Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl is searing. . . A novel about a young woman who is learning how to perform her femininity, who is learning the power of it, the fragility of it.” - Roxane Gay, Bookslut

“Zambreno’s care and diligence for walking the line between artifice and consumption is brilliant here: this is a book I could see savored by both a teen finding great solace in, and by someone like myself, who probably could not be more removed from the lifestyle of its matter, who is interested more in how the operation occurs, the patiently squirming sentences hiding and exposing at once what they fear.” - Blake Butler, HTMLGiant

“Brilliant. . . This is a book I could see savored by both a teen finding great solace in, and by someone like myself, who probably could not be more removed from the lifestyle of its matter.” - Blake Butler, HTMLGiant

“Kate Zambreno writes with the clear eyes and steady hand of a vérité filmmaker.” - Pamela Lu

“A major step forward for a talented and whip-smart writer.” - James Greer, BookForum

“I can’t recall the last time I read a book whose heroine infuriated and seduced me as completely as Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl.” - Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair

“[An] electric talent . . . a risqué darling [with] serious literary cachet.” - Gina Frangello, The Rumpus

“Reading this book is like eating Oreos, if Oreos could be filled with spiders and simultaneously retain their addictive power. I kept opening it, thinking I’d just read a chapter or two, and find myself fifty pages later coming up soaked in the poison of Ruth’s life. . . . I found myself reading on because Zambreno so exhaustively catalogs the world of the green girl here, all its dangerous pleasures and glamorous hurts. Zambreno knows-and if you were ever a green girl, you will recognize yourself on page after page.” - Lightsey Darst, Bookslut