Animal Stories

by 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 “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.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

120 pages, Paperback

Published September 16, 2025

About the author

Kate 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.

Reviews

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Madeline Hausmann-Hicks · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 stars

[Josie Tunnell · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Niki Gajjar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the first essay but it fell apart a bit for me by the end

[Shadib Bin · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Glen Helfand · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Maya Tsingos · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5?) this 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.

[Susie · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[victoria marie]

Not yet published • Expected 16 Sep 25

[Matthew Roche · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.