Animal Stories

A curious 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 recognise 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 decipher our complex ‘zoo feelings’ – what we project, and what we refuse to see. In ‘My Kafka System’, which 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.

In writing that is inquisitive and inventive, Zambreno renders visible the enclosures we construct and those we occupy ourselves.

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.