Cynthia Zarin – författare

An Enlarged Heart, the exquisitely written prose debut from prize-winning poet Cynthia Zarin, is a poignantly understated exploration of the author’s experiences with love, work, and the surprise of time’s passage. In these intertwined episodes from her New York world and beyond, she charts the shifting and complicated parameters of contemporary life and family in writing that feels nearly fictional in its richness of scene, dialogue, and mood. The writer herself is the marvelously rueful character at the center of these tales, at first a bewildered young woman, navigating the terrain of new jobs and borrowed apartments and the rapidly fading New York of people like Mr. Ferri, the Upper East Side tailor (“a wren of a man with pins flashing in his teeth”). By the end, whether Zarin is writing about vanished restaurants, her decades-long love affair with her collection of coats, a newlywed journey to Italy, a child’s illness, Mary McCarthy’s file cabinet, or the inner life of the New Yorker staff she knew as a young woman, this history of the heart shows us how persistent the past is in returning to us with entirely new lessons, and that there are some truths not even a tailor can alter.

A daring, heartbreaking novel, Inverno is the book that J. D. Salinger’s Franny Glass might have written a few decades into her adulthood.Caroline waited for fifteen minutes in the snow. After a little time had passed, she was simply waiting to see what would happen. It was entirely possible he would not come. If he did not come, she would be in a different story than the one she had imagined, but it was possible, she knew, to imagine anything.Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park in a snowstorm for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won’t he? The story moves the way the mind does: years flash by in an instant—now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever present are the complicated negotiations of the heart. This brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, author of An Enlarged Heart, is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the present shatter. Elliptical and inventive in the mode of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Inverno is miraculous and startling. It asks, How does love make and unmake a life?

A daring, heartbreaking novel, Inverno is the book that J. D. Salinger’s Franny Glass might have written a few decades into her adulthood.Caroline waited for fifteen minutes in the snow. After a little time had passed, she was simply waiting to see what would happen. It was entirely possible he would not come. If he did not come, she would be in a different story than the one she had imagined, but it was possible, she knew, to imagine anything.Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park in a snowstorm for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won’t he? The story moves the way the mind does: years flash by in an instant—now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever present are the complicated negotiations of the heart. This brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, author of An Enlarged Heart, is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the present shatter. Elliptical and inventive in the mode of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Inverno is miraculous and startling. It asks, How does love make and unmake a life?

From the celebrated poet and author of the critically acclaimed novel Inverno comes a mesmerizing new novel, Estate.Caroline, separated from her husband, finds herself drawn to Lorenzo, who has not one but two other lovers. In these propulsive pages, Caroline speaks during a summer of erotic intensity and crisis, recording the stories of seduction, deception, and make-believe that she and Lorenzo tell each other-but how true are any of them?Sweeping across time and space, Estate is a tightly compressed tour de force in which Caroline sees revelations and responsibilities collide. From New Guinea to word games, Italian cinema to communication theory, Cynthia Zarin's refractive, mirrorlike novel charts the exigencies of desire, bringing to mind the work of Annie Ernaux and Clarice Lispector and illustrating how a person can disappear in a hall of stories and reflections. Many of your stories are about this, how you acquired the last thing you wanted, says Caroline to Lorenzo. But what does Caroline want? How elastic is love? Of Zarin's previous novel, Inverno, Sigrid Nunez wrote in The New York Times, "To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art." In Estate, a summer counterpart to wintry Inverno, Caroline reassembles her field of vision from a trove of gleaming shards. Shockingly intense and psychologically penetrating, Cynthia Zarin is a writer of passionate insight, and a formidable new presence in American fiction.

From the celebrated poet and author of the critically acclaimed novel Inverno comes a mesmerizing new novel, Estate.Caroline, separated from her husband, finds herself drawn to Lorenzo, who has not one but two other lovers. In these propulsive pages, Caroline herself speaks during a summer of erotic intensity and crisis, recording the stories of seduction, deception, and make-believe she and Lorenzo tell each other—but how true are any of them? Not a sequel to Cynthia Zarin''s Inverno but an astounding mirror image in which revelations and responsibilities collide, Estate is a tight, compressed tour de force that sweeps across time and space, from New Guinea to word games, Italian cinema to communication theory, bringing to mind Annie Ernaux and Elena Ferrante, charting the exigencies of desire—and asking how can a person disappear in a hall of stories and reflections?Many of your stories are about this, how you acquired the last thing you wanted, says Caroline to Lorenzo. But what does Caroline want? How elastic is love? Of Inverno, Sigrid Nunez wrote in The New York Times, “To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art.” In Estate, a summer counterpart to wintry Inverno, Caroline reassembles her field of vision from a trove of gleaming shards.

A daring, heartbreaking novel, Inverno is the book that J. D. Salinger’s Franny Glass might have written a few decades into her adulthood.Caroline waited for fifteen minutes in the snow. After a little time had passed, she was simply waiting to see what would happen. It was entirely possible he would not come. If he did not come, she would be in a different story than the one she had imagined, but it was possible, she knew, to imagine anything.Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park in a snowstorm for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won’t he? The story moves the way the mind does: years flash by in an instant—now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever present are the complicated negotiations of the heart. This brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, author of An Enlarged Heart, is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the present shatter. Elliptical and inventive in the mode of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Inverno is miraculous and startling. It asks, How does love make and unmake a life?

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 From the celebrated poet and author of the critically acclaimed novel Inverno comes a mesmerizing new novel, Estate.Caroline, separated from her husband, finds herself drawn to Lorenzo, who has not one but two other lovers. During a summer of erotic intensity and crisis, Caroline speaks, recording the stories of seduction, deception, and make-believe that she and Lorenzo tell each other-but how true are any of them? Sweeping across time and space, Estate is a tightly compressed tour de force in which Caroline sees revelations and responsibilities collide. From New Guinea to word games, Italian cinema to communication theory, Cynthia Zarin's refractive, mirrorlike novel charts the exigencies of desire, bringing to mind the work of Annie Ernaux and Clarice Lispector and illustrating how a person can disappear in a hall of stories and reflections. Many of your stories are about this, how you acquired the last thing you wanted, says Caroline to Lorenzo. But what does Caroline want? How elastic is love? Of Zarin's previous novel, Inverno, Sigrid Nunez wrote in The New York Times, "To see the chaos of suffering shaped into something beautiful is one of the main reasons we turn to art." In Estate, a summer counterpart to wintry Inverno, Caroline reassembles her field of vision from a trove of gleaming shards. Shockingly intense and psychologically penetrating, Cynthia Zarin is a writer of passionate insight, and a formidable new presence in American fiction.