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Undelivered Lectures
Animal Stories
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 “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.
Drawing on forms including reports, essays, journals, and stories, Zambreno renders visible the enclosures we construct and the ones we occupy ourselves.
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 “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.
Drawing on forms including reports, essays, journals, and stories, Zambreno renders visible the enclosures we construct and the ones we occupy ourselves.
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
120 pages, Paperback
Published September 16, 2025
About the author
Kate Zambreno
30 books805 followersKate Zambreno is the author of the novels Green Girl (Harper Perennial) and O Fallen Angel (Harper Perennial). She is also the author of Heroines (Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents) and Book of Mutter (Semiotexte(e)'s Native Agents). A collection of talks and essays, The Appendix Project, is forthcoming from Semiotext(e) in April 2019, and a collection of stories and other writing, Screen Tests, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in June 2019. She is at work on a novel, Drifts, and a study of Hervé Guibert. She teaches at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 26, 2026
In the first half of their fragmented essay Animal Stories, author and academic Kate Zambreno presents meditations on city zoos from The Ménagerie in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes to New York’s Bronx and Central Park Zoos. Zambreno draws on numerous critical, literary and artistic texts to consider the intricate interplay between spectator and spectacle. They insert anecdotes and snippets of cultural history sketching out how these zoos were conceptualised and came into being – outcrop of wider imperial/colonial projects. They also muse on the, often appalling, fate of more famous animals once contained in them. Animals marketed in ways that established them as celebrity attractions: Berlin’s short-lived polar bear Knut fictionalised in Yōko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear; nineteenth-century Jumbo an elephant kept in London Zoo for over twenty years, ridden by children during the day, at night, in his cage he ground his tusks so violently his keeper plied him with whiskey to calm him down. They also look at the use of zoos to prop up broader ideological positions: the particularly horrific culling of the animals of Japan’s Ueno Zoo during WW2 then made the subject of an elaborate memorial service for an audience primarily composed of schoolchildren, held up as martyrs whose “willing” sacrifice mirrored Japan’s sacrifices for an honourable cause.
Much of the work informing Zambreno’s reflections will be (overly)familiar to anyone conversant with earlier iterations of Animal Studies within the Humanities – before its foundations were shaken by the less ethically and politically compromised Critical Animal Studies. So, for instance, Zambreno cites Derrida shrinking before his cat’s steely gaze, John Berger’s classic About Looking, adding in a dash of Haraway and a generous pinch of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and his iconoclastic character Elizabeth Costello. All of which gives this a curiously dated feel. Zambreno seems preoccupied with acts of looking that are simultaneously acts of looking through or past, seeing but not seeing. Although their agenda is far from explicit. As usual, Zambreno’s writing’s carefully scripted disguised as digressive, presented as chains of associations in which one observation seems by happenstance to lead to the next. Here too are their customary autobiographical interventions, in this case a scattered chronicle of taking their small children to zoos.
I usually enjoy Zambreno’s writing and, on some levels, this is an intriguing, illuminating exploration but, for me – vegan, zoo hater - profoundly alienating. At one point Zambreno says:
“It is important, I feel, to at least partly disassociate when at the zoo, and to avoid thinking of the lives of animals who have lived their entire existences in captivity.”
Their statement could be interpreted as a relatively ‘neutral’ observation except that this is what Zambreno actually does; even incorporating zoos into their children’s education and socialisation. For me zoos are barbaric spaces, prisons in which non-human animals face a life sentence of torture without the possibility of parole. Zambreno acknowledges the cruelty of zoo environments but opts for ambivalence. An ambivalence that put me most in mind of the walrus in Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter. The walrus and the carpenter entice a group of oysters to follow them along the shore; the carpenter then proceeds to quietly devour them. But the walrus openly sympathises with their pitiable state, weeping into his handkerchief as he stuffs them into his mouth. Similarly, Zambreno laments the nature of zoos - and what being imprisoned in them does to animals - yet directly contributes to their continuance.
In the second half Zambreno abruptly switches to writings on Kafka: his life, his health, his animal stories; much of which is broken up into brief, pithy sections. Zambreno’s known for deploying juxtaposition to tease out meaning but I found it difficult to fully fathom the likely connections between Kafka and earlier zoo material. In part it seems to be grounded in concepts of human embodiment and perspectives on so-called “animality.” Zambreno retains traditional human/animal binaries which felt curiously conservative especially given their progressive stance in other areas. The standout for me was the mini-essay “Insekt or large venomous thing” which interweaves Gregor’s experiences in The Metamorphosis with Zambreno’s exhausted juggling of late pregnancy and imminent birth and the outlandish attendance requirements of the institution where they're employed as an adjunct.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Scribner UK for an ARC
Rating: 2.5
Much of the work informing Zambreno’s reflections will be (overly)familiar to anyone conversant with earlier iterations of Animal Studies within the Humanities – before its foundations were shaken by the less ethically and politically compromised Critical Animal Studies. So, for instance, Zambreno cites Derrida shrinking before his cat’s steely gaze, John Berger’s classic About Looking, adding in a dash of Haraway and a generous pinch of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and his iconoclastic character Elizabeth Costello. All of which gives this a curiously dated feel. Zambreno seems preoccupied with acts of looking that are simultaneously acts of looking through or past, seeing but not seeing. Although their agenda is far from explicit. As usual, Zambreno’s writing’s carefully scripted disguised as digressive, presented as chains of associations in which one observation seems by happenstance to lead to the next. Here too are their customary autobiographical interventions, in this case a scattered chronicle of taking their small children to zoos.
I usually enjoy Zambreno’s writing and, on some levels, this is an intriguing, illuminating exploration but, for me – vegan, zoo hater - profoundly alienating. At one point Zambreno says:
“It is important, I feel, to at least partly disassociate when at the zoo, and to avoid thinking of the lives of animals who have lived their entire existences in captivity.”
Their statement could be interpreted as a relatively ‘neutral’ observation except that this is what Zambreno actually does; even incorporating zoos into their children’s education and socialisation. For me zoos are barbaric spaces, prisons in which non-human animals face a life sentence of torture without the possibility of parole. Zambreno acknowledges the cruelty of zoo environments but opts for ambivalence. An ambivalence that put me most in mind of the walrus in Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter. The walrus and the carpenter entice a group of oysters to follow them along the shore; the carpenter then proceeds to quietly devour them. But the walrus openly sympathises with their pitiable state, weeping into his handkerchief as he stuffs them into his mouth. Similarly, Zambreno laments the nature of zoos - and what being imprisoned in them does to animals - yet directly contributes to their continuance.
In the second half Zambreno abruptly switches to writings on Kafka: his life, his health, his animal stories; much of which is broken up into brief, pithy sections. Zambreno’s known for deploying juxtaposition to tease out meaning but I found it difficult to fully fathom the likely connections between Kafka and earlier zoo material. In part it seems to be grounded in concepts of human embodiment and perspectives on so-called “animality.” Zambreno retains traditional human/animal binaries which felt curiously conservative especially given their progressive stance in other areas. The standout for me was the mini-essay “Insekt or large venomous thing” which interweaves Gregor’s experiences in The Metamorphosis with Zambreno’s exhausted juggling of late pregnancy and imminent birth and the outlandish attendance requirements of the institution where they're employed as an adjunct.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Scribner UK for an ARC
Rating: 2.5
October 8, 2025
Bleak, slim book. Heavily intertextual, heavily influenced by Sebald, at least formally. Having studied with Kate during the period of her writing this I recognized its sources in our past readings—Yoko Tawada, Anne Carson, etc. There are strains related to embodiment and disembodiment, to precarity and specifically the precarity of adjunct labor, to a underclass feeling. Bitterness, loneliness, disenfranchisement. Hard to pin down but I think my favorite work outside of Heroines so far from KZ!
December 18, 2025
I would rate this book higher if it was just the first part, Zoo Studies. The book really lost me during the Kafka stories, I am unfamiliar with his writing so it was hard for me to care about the Kafka stuff.
Zoo stories was a wonderful essay on the author spending more time in zoos with their young children & the observations those trips stirred up. It delved into other’s writing on the subject & the relationship between viewer & viewed.
I picked this book up because I used to design zoo habitats & I had a lot of feelings & complex thoughts on the situation we put these animals in & how it feels for a creature to live in an environment where they can be watched & surveillanced. Zoo stories expanded on a lot of those thoughts I had in my own work.
Zoo stories was a wonderful essay on the author spending more time in zoos with their young children & the observations those trips stirred up. It delved into other’s writing on the subject & the relationship between viewer & viewed.
I picked this book up because I used to design zoo habitats & I had a lot of feelings & complex thoughts on the situation we put these animals in & how it feels for a creature to live in an environment where they can be watched & surveillanced. Zoo stories expanded on a lot of those thoughts I had in my own work.
October 5, 2025
3.5/5 stars
September 30, 2025
I enjoyed the first essay but it fell apart a bit for me by the end
September 30, 2025
Kate has gradually become one of my absolute favourite authors. Her writing is very dreamlike; she weaves in really well-researched stories but lets them breathe, which allows readers like myself to be transported into a slower, more pleasurable time.
Animal Stories is namely her exploration of animals, from the confinement of cages (i.e. zoos) and how unbearably sad it is, for both the spectators (humans stuck in the cage of capitalism) and the animals in the zoo itself. How this act of going to the zoo can possibly be a fun activity is something that confounds Zambreno—strange, as she herself repeatedly partakes with her children and husband. Such is life, where confusion breeds further oddities; we are left with no answers.
Zambreno hasn’t been afraid to dig deep into being a guest lecturer/adjunct professor, and the perils it comes with; possibly one to two weeks off after giving birth, under the table no less, no real sick days unless for a medical emergency, and many other things that really can eat at your soul. It does for Zambreno, and I am glad, selfishly, that even amid such tepid conditions, she pushes herself to write such deeply meditative, strange works of art that I know transcend time itself. I hope she’ll look back at the body of work and be proud of what she has put out, consistently.
A book to treasure, one of her best, and I continue to be excited for all that she has yet to write.
Animal Stories is namely her exploration of animals, from the confinement of cages (i.e. zoos) and how unbearably sad it is, for both the spectators (humans stuck in the cage of capitalism) and the animals in the zoo itself. How this act of going to the zoo can possibly be a fun activity is something that confounds Zambreno—strange, as she herself repeatedly partakes with her children and husband. Such is life, where confusion breeds further oddities; we are left with no answers.
Zambreno hasn’t been afraid to dig deep into being a guest lecturer/adjunct professor, and the perils it comes with; possibly one to two weeks off after giving birth, under the table no less, no real sick days unless for a medical emergency, and many other things that really can eat at your soul. It does for Zambreno, and I am glad, selfishly, that even amid such tepid conditions, she pushes herself to write such deeply meditative, strange works of art that I know transcend time itself. I hope she’ll look back at the body of work and be proud of what she has put out, consistently.
A book to treasure, one of her best, and I continue to be excited for all that she has yet to write.
April 2, 2026
Made me want to read Kafka finally. A lot of this was over my head, unfamiliar names and continuing discussions I'm not following, since I'm not in academia. My take-away is too much is simply dropped in our laps with no context, making me wonder what the author's intent was. And really, we're not impressed with your NYC lifestyle. You have babies. How nice for you.
October 29, 2025
Kafka goes to the zoo. Both are peculiar in their own ways. Kate Zambreno goes on deep, digressive dives. It is her forte in writing. Her books are intimately obsessive, ordinary yet full of intellectual and literary curiosity. You wonder how she lands in certain places, but I find it so easy to go down her brainy yet breezy rabbit holes. I haven't been to a zoo in years, but Zambreno reminded me why I hadn't, and why it is a place that young minds interpret differently. Neither have I read Kafka since high school, and never had I thought of him doing exercises in his underwear, or was he nude? After reading Animal Stories, I'm so ready to reread The Metamorphosis.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Zambreno is always interesting to read but I expected something a bit more substantial than I got here.
The first half is a meditative piece on zoos, and while it synthesises some interesting points about voyeurism, animal/human interactions and freedom (or lack of, in this case) they have been done before. The personal lifts this section somewhat, and the background research into stories of the various zoos.
Then, at almost exactly the halfway point, the zoo writing ends and we move to Kafka. A lot of time is spent looking at his diaries, his travels, his family relationships but it's a while before we get to the point of Metamorphosis and Gregor's animal experience.
This section is also broken up by Zambreno's rather bitter descriptions of her career as an adjunct academic without tenure, security, and fixity. There's some attempt to tie the problematics of precarity back to the earlier ideas, especially in relation to teaching while having to hide a pregnant, leaky body but it can feel a bit arbitrary, despite mediating stories such as Derrida and his cat.
As a Zambreno fan I was primed to like this, but it doesn't have the same ferocity and insights as her Heroines.
Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley
The first half is a meditative piece on zoos, and while it synthesises some interesting points about voyeurism, animal/human interactions and freedom (or lack of, in this case) they have been done before. The personal lifts this section somewhat, and the background research into stories of the various zoos.
Then, at almost exactly the halfway point, the zoo writing ends and we move to Kafka. A lot of time is spent looking at his diaries, his travels, his family relationships but it's a while before we get to the point of Metamorphosis and Gregor's animal experience.
This section is also broken up by Zambreno's rather bitter descriptions of her career as an adjunct academic without tenure, security, and fixity. There's some attempt to tie the problematics of precarity back to the earlier ideas, especially in relation to teaching while having to hide a pregnant, leaky body but it can feel a bit arbitrary, despite mediating stories such as Derrida and his cat.
As a Zambreno fan I was primed to like this, but it doesn't have the same ferocity and insights as her Heroines.
Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
The first essay featured in this slim volume centres on zoos. Zambreno examines their history and, to an extent, their function in today’s society. I found a number of the anecdotes told throughout both depressing and harrowing.
Modern zoos in the Western world have improved massively since their introduction into public life, but the bar, as they say, is in hell. While informative and evocative in many ways, there were no real arguments or revelations introduced in the first essay, although it did remind me of my own personal disdain for such places, for the most part.
Halfway through the book, Zambreno pivots to Kafka. I do enjoy his work but know next to nothing of his life, so I found this section enlightening, though I don’t feel it quite lived up to the quality or passion evident in the first part.
Nevertheless, it’s worth a look.
With thanks to Simon & Schuster UK for the ARC.
Modern zoos in the Western world have improved massively since their introduction into public life, but the bar, as they say, is in hell. While informative and evocative in many ways, there were no real arguments or revelations introduced in the first essay, although it did remind me of my own personal disdain for such places, for the most part.
Halfway through the book, Zambreno pivots to Kafka. I do enjoy his work but know next to nothing of his life, so I found this section enlightening, though I don’t feel it quite lived up to the quality or passion evident in the first part.
Nevertheless, it’s worth a look.
With thanks to Simon & Schuster UK for the ARC.
Read
February 18, 2026Often—and in my inmost self perhaps all the time—I doubt whether I am a human being.
A very unique take on zoos, Kafka, and blurring the lines. As famous as Kafka is, I'm still surprised to learn something new about him when I see him through someone else's eyes. So often with famous writers, we are only familiar with their most famous works. But often what is most interesting about them is seeing their entire body of work, from early parts of their life to later parts of their life (including the less brilliant works in their oeuvre), as insights into how they embodied their life philosophy throughout different times of their lives.
Of Kafka's animal stories, "There is no subject, there are only collective arrangements of utterance." No stable subject, but a multiplicity. The narrator is unreliable. Also porous [...] language in the animal stories is (this is so Deleuzian) "deterritorialized."
A very unique take on zoos, Kafka, and blurring the lines. As famous as Kafka is, I'm still surprised to learn something new about him when I see him through someone else's eyes. So often with famous writers, we are only familiar with their most famous works. But often what is most interesting about them is seeing their entire body of work, from early parts of their life to later parts of their life (including the less brilliant works in their oeuvre), as insights into how they embodied their life philosophy throughout different times of their lives.
Of Kafka's animal stories, "There is no subject, there are only collective arrangements of utterance." No stable subject, but a multiplicity. The narrator is unreliable. Also porous [...] language in the animal stories is (this is so Deleuzian) "deterritorialized."
September 30, 2025
The first part of the book talked about animals and zoos. The second part is a discussion of Kafka and the animal stories that he wrote. It would be helpful to have some knowledge of Kafka's stories. I found it difficult to understand what was going on.
October 6, 2025
The first half of Animal Stories is a delight. Zambreno is a talented writer and she manages a deft analysis of the weirdness that is a zoo. Weaving historical record with art and art criticism, she manages to create a long essay that is both interesting and personal. She is fascinated and repelled by zoos, but the underlying message is more why the living hell do we still have these if nobody actually likes them (except very young kids and weird lonely women).
The second half, however, feels strained and more performance than personal, like something she wants to want to write, but maybe is tired of talking about. There are interesting tidbits about Kafka and his life interspersed with historical record and topical related scholarship. It feels like analysis by a well-trained academic, with the right references and a solid through-line, but no passion.
Perhaps the book/theme pairing is a personal lament of a hard-working academic trapped in a world where she has not and may not achieve freedom. Zambreno is the Orangutang making art, keeping busy to stave off anxiety. She is trapped in an academic position which is only partly a position and is patently inhumane, and her essays might just be painting the bars of her enclosure.
In a perfect world, Zambreno would be free, both of the numbing idiocy of modern academia with its adjuncts and pretend positions, and of the strictures of academic thinking. One wonders what would happen if she said f— off to the canonical authorities from Benjamin to Deleuze and just charged the cannon with her own powder.
The second half, however, feels strained and more performance than personal, like something she wants to want to write, but maybe is tired of talking about. There are interesting tidbits about Kafka and his life interspersed with historical record and topical related scholarship. It feels like analysis by a well-trained academic, with the right references and a solid through-line, but no passion.
Perhaps the book/theme pairing is a personal lament of a hard-working academic trapped in a world where she has not and may not achieve freedom. Zambreno is the Orangutang making art, keeping busy to stave off anxiety. She is trapped in an academic position which is only partly a position and is patently inhumane, and her essays might just be painting the bars of her enclosure.
In a perfect world, Zambreno would be free, both of the numbing idiocy of modern academia with its adjuncts and pretend positions, and of the strictures of academic thinking. One wonders what would happen if she said f— off to the canonical authorities from Benjamin to Deleuze and just charged the cannon with her own powder.
Read
January 24, 2026this reads a bit like an extended substack essay (but, like, a really good substack essay). loose, gooey, philosophical narrative nonfiction. wandering and wondering (probably a bit too wandering, but i have a soft spot for that kind of stuff). all in all: unexpectedly charming. will def be picking up more from this undelivered lectures series.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews