Animal Stories

Animal Stories

$17.95

Kate Zambreno

From a writer who has “invented a new form” (Annie Ernaux), an exploration of mortality, alienation, boredom, surveillance, and how we regard ourselves among the animals.

Animal Stories begins with Kate Zambreno’s visit to the monkey house at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where one stark tree “seems to be the stage design for a simian production of Waiting for Godot.” But who are the players and who is the audience, and can they recognize each other?

What follows is a series of reports from the deep strangeness of the zoo, a space that is “more often than not deeply sad, an odd choice for regular pilgrimages of fun.” Amid these excursions with their young children, Zambreno turns to Garry Winogrand’s photographs and John Berger’s writings on animals, reshaping the spectator as the subject to decode our complex “zoo feelings”—what we project, and what we refuse to see. Then, in the “Kafka system” that dovetails with these zoo studies, Zambreno thinks through the notebooks and animal stories of a writer known for playing at the threshold between species, continuing their investigation into the false divide between human and animal.

Drawing on forms including reports, essays, journals, and stories, Zambreno renders visible the enclosures we construct and the ones we occupy ourselves.

Animal Stories is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.

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Praise for Kate Zambreno:

“Kate Zambreno’s oeuvre is not just a series of books but a body of thought, an uninterrupted exhortation on incompleteness and the intersections of life, death, time, memory, and silence.”—Sarah Manguso

“It may be among the most lasting literature of Covid, a lightbox for the future: the story of a mother looking for brightness in a diary of dark days.”—New York Times Book Review

“With The Light Room, Zambreno — one of our most prolific and curious minds—chronicles what it’s like to be a mother amidst the various crises of this chaotic moment in history.”—Vulture

“Luminous. . . . This book is a meditation on the practice of art and observation in the mundane. It’s about the beauty in maintenance, and it reached me at the right time. . . . Zambreno has a facility with descriptions of the mundane, finding in them something marvelous and often funny.”—Niina Pollari

“The Light Room reminded me of that fundamental magic of writing—that the details of another person’s life, so precisely and honestly rendered, can instantly loosen the edges of your own life and make you feel less alone.”—Jenny Odell

“A gorgeous document of the tender and precise place where art and mothering necessarily meet. Natural and urban spaces float and glow under Kate Zambreno’s observant eye. Each leaf, each book, is a love letter activated by bohemian saints: the artists and writers who pass through her small rooms and far-reaching mind.”—Samantha Hunt

“The Light Room is a marvelous and marvel-filled book. Zambreno’s mind is like a magic filter discovering secrets when turned on any sort of item—a tiny toy, a loom, an artist, a mortality. A wonderful book, a companion for all the varieties of days.”—Rivka Galchen