Animal Stories - (Undelivered Lectures) by Kate Zambreno (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Animal Stories:

"Zambreno's lucid writing and relentless inquisitiveness shine."--Publishers Weekly

"Lyrical meditations on the creative imagination and the animal in all of us...[Animal Stories] is a tour of the zoo cages of the writer's own mind, opened for all of us to gaze on and gasp."--Kirkus Reviews

"I loved the precision of Kate Zambreno's Animal Stories--a literal attention so heightened that it becomes distinct and peculiar...Few human animals have Zambreno's baleful honesty, insight, or relish for comedy, when they look at themselves."--Daisy Hildyard, author of Emergency

"A searching, charmingly discursive meditation...Zambreno's reveries flit between criticism, history, and memoir--an approach well-suited to the diffuse melancholy of the zoo."--Dan Piepenbring, Harper's

"A personal, historical, and philosophical reflection on the gap between human and animal perceptions of each other...[Animal Stories] considers the tragicomic implications of our own animal being."--Brian Dillon, 4Columns

"The magic of this slim book is its surprising expansiveness, its invitation to, and illumination of, the individual's shifting 'gaze.'"--Irish Times

"A view on the world using a deep field of focus that renders details near and far with equal clarity. Ostensibly unrelated figures are thus united within the writer's rich conceptual frame...Blazingly erudite...Animal Stories reflects [Zambreno's] vital unboundedness."--The Brooklyn Rail

"Zambreno is one of our most inventive and formally daring writers...[Animal Stories] sees them at the height of their powers."--The Millions

"Zambreno, a brilliant feminist author whose insights have recontextualized generations of writings by women, visits the monkey house at a Parisian zoo. This window into simian behavior offers Zambreno some astonishing new insights into the whole of human behavior--including how we consider ourselves in relation to other animals."--The Seattle Times

"Voyeurs all, we peer on as Zambreno attempts to wrangle their wide-ranging curiosity and considerable breadth of knowledge in pursuit of some deeper solution or truth, of what lurks behind these phenomena of alienation and overwork."--Cleaver Magazine

"The genre-bending reports in Animal Stories form a fascinating, kaleidoscopic meditation on the act of observing other animals and how we view ourselves among them. . . . It's an outstanding marriage of personal narrative and literary criticism."--Keith Rutowski, Boswell Book Company (Milwaukee, WI)

Praise for Kate Zambreno:

"Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup."--Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

About the Author

Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts; To Write As if Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert; The Light Room; and a collaborative study on tone in literature with Sofia Samatar. They live in Brooklyn with their two children and their partner, John Vincler. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, they are a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU.