Animal Stories

Animal Stories

$18.95

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.

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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

"Elegant . . . This is a book about the aloneness of motherhood—the limits of maternal attention, the dissolution of self, the mind-numbing tedium of raising small children—[and] a book about a ‘life inside’—not just inside the home, but inside the mind. . . . 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

“Zambreno’s work reminds us that there is grace in going for a walk and feeling the energy of the seasons. There’s value in play and stillness and making art even when it feels like the world is on fire. . . . Zambreno’s project, from book to book, seems in part to be recording and celebrating those quiet moments, like the blossoms on a cherry tree, beautiful but ephemeral, or a child sounding out her first word. Those moments are fleeting, but their impact remains long after they have elapsed. . . . In the pages of The Light Room, they pay this miracle forward to us.” —Brian Gresko, Poets & Writers

“Despite the unfathomable distractions we're all facing, Zambreno writes with a sense of hope that will especially resonate with anyone who's soldiered through pandemic-era parenting.” —Harper's Bazaar

“[Zambreno’s] latest mode-warping work of memoir chronicles many of the writer’s own aching attempts at maternal insulation. . . . Its blessing lies not so much in any sunlight refuge as in the clarity and breadth of the view it provides: that being is at once shorter and longer and smaller and larger than we can ever hope to know.” —Ellie Eberlee, Chicago Review of Books

“Incandescent . . .The tension between crisis and joy resonated with me on a deep level as a parent, a writer, and a reader, as did the attention to the fine art of caretaking.” —Emily Raboteau, Orion

“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 their 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