Tone - by Sofia Samatar & Kate Zambreno

About the Book

Tone is a collaborative study of literary tone, exploring its implications for community, politics, and ecology.

Book Synopsis

Tone is a collaborative study of literary tone, a notoriously challenging and slippery topic for criticism. Both granular and global, infusing a text with feeling, tone is so difficult to pin down that responses to it often take the vague form of "I know it when I see it."

In Tone, a cooperative authorial voice under the name of the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere begins from the premise that tone is relational, belonging to shared experience rather than a single author, and should be approached through a communal practice. In partnership, the Committee explores the atmospheres emanating from texts by Nella Larsen, W. G. Sebald, Heike Geissler, Hiroko Oyamada, Mieko Kanai, Bhanu Kapil, Franz Kafka, Renee Gladman, and others, attending to the chafing of political irritation, the hunger of precarious and temporary work, and the lonely delights of urban and suburban walks.

This study treats a variety of questions: How is tone filtered through translation? Can a text hold the feelings that pass between humans and animals? What can attention to literary tone reveal about shared spaces such as factories, universities, and streets and the clashes and connections that happen there? Searching and conversational, Tone seeks immersion in literary affect to convey the experience of reading--and living--together.

Review Quotes

[The book is] not protests or polemics; motherhood's political horizon isn't their particular interest. Their target is more elusive.--Nicholas Dames "N+1"

Carrying on and re-making collaborative methods of literary scholarship . . . the collective voice of Tone brings new urgency, transparency, and intimacy to the act of coauthorship.--Charlie Hope-D'Anieri "ASAP/Journal"

What is the best preposition for Tone? Possibly it is "through," as in the committee worming its way through texts, fertilizing them, mixing up the organic matter, making room for air and water to get deeper inside. I like this metaphor, as somehow this book feels as though it's working toward a healthier ecosystem, richer soil, a place where other living things can grow. I think the most apt preposition, however, is "among," as in "among others," in the group or the crowd. . . . I feel welcome to follow and then diverge onto my own path, to find my own position and direction. There is no formal invitation, but there's an inviting gesture, an opening we can enter and a space for us to inhabit.--Rebecca Hussey "Atmospheric Quarterly"

This is imaginative criticism, not dryly analytical but poetic. Books about art can also be art.--Wesley Osam "Super Doomed Planet"

[This] book is a paradigm for how theory gets written now: in merged voices, as if courting disorientation, through unpredictable leaps of subject matter, and with a constant reference to ambient collective experience, all fusing into an anti-mastery with a nostalgia for impossible mastery. The tone of our moment, let's say. And tones, Samatar and Zambreno demonstrate, have moments.--Nicholas Dames "Public Books"

In book reviews, a translation's tone is as frequently complimented as it is criticized, and most often, little more about the translation is said. We all know what we mean by tone, right? This is why the Committee's intervention is so vital: they are starting from scratch; and they are starting by scratching, rubbing, relating, touching, tending. They are reading and repeating: the blue you see is not the same blue that I see; I hear you differently than you want to be heard; my nose, my room, my furniture, my language is not the same as yours.--Claire Foster "ARCADE"

[This] book will be a vital resource for imagining the future of creative work in the 21st century.--Safa Khatib "The Markaz Review"

An insightful, playful, and unique book of creative criticism . . . Tone is a beautiful book of conjecture: a fine, long essay in the tradition of William Gass's On Being Blue.--Nick Ripatrazone "Image Journal"

Just as the world laments the apparent lack of insightful literary criticism as well as the dwindling number of venues that support it, here comes the dazzling Committee to Investigate Atmosphere with a piece of criticism like no other. Writing collaboratively and in luscious, piercing dialogue with students and peers, Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar set out to interrogate the question of tone from every angle imaginable: what it is or might be, how it wraps around the human and non-human, how it affects work and space, rooting readers in territories through specific prepositions; why it has proclivity for windows and community. Reading thickly and in context a to-die-for selection of contemporary creative and theoretical works--including, lo and behold, texts in translation--the Committee reminds us that often we read books less for plot, character or setting, and more for the quality of atmosphere, seeking--quite simply and quite momentously--to "breathe that air again."--Cristina Rivera Garza, author of Grieving and The Taiga Syndrome

A lyrical, erudite meditation.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

A "Most Anticipated" Book of 2023-- "The Millions"

In this subtle, haunting study, "the Committee" investigates what it means to write both of and on the cloud. Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno gave themselves over to the nebulous space of a collective reading and writing practice, seeking neither plot nor character, but rather that most indefinable of literary qualities: tone. Joining them there is eerily calming: "Someone else has entered the chat. And so here we are." After three years of constant, anxious reminders that we are breathing each other's air, try as we might to remain particular, there is something immensely gratifying about surrendering to this pronoun of our plural, historical intimacy.--Barbara Browning, author of The Gift and The Miniaturists

This book is a gorgeous inventory of baroque intensities, spooked consciousnesses, vibrational affectivities, and shifting moods--written in and through precarity's duration. The Committee has convened to remind us, in shimmering and intricate prose, that all thinking is collective thinking. In the doorway of thought: a 'we' steps into the weather of literature.--Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism and The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void

About the Author

Sofia Samatar is the author of five books, most recently the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist. Her works include the World Fantasy Award-winning A Stranger in Olondria and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. A scholar of Afrofuturism and modern Arabic literature of Africa, she teaches at James Madison University.

Kate Zambreno is the author of nine books, including The Light Room, a meditation on art and care, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim nonfiction fellowship in 2021. She is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and also teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.