Taking the psychic space of the zoo as its starting point, Animal Stories considers boredom, mortality, alienation, surveillance, and how we regard ourselves among the animals.

John Berger looked at our alienation from animals in the history of capitalism. Garry Winogrand looked at the zoo as a theater of humans and animals. Kate Zambreno looks at us looking at them, then looks at themself looking at Kafka. What desires and thoughts do we project in our looking? How is doing so an attempt to describe and reassemble our fragmented selves?

Cementing Zambreno's place as one of the most innovative thinkers of their generation, Animal Stories ranges from the complex psychic space of the zoo to the Paris Jardin des Plantes to the writhing animal paintings of Francis Bacon to Kafka's travel journals. The result is a study of human attempts to capture and regard movement in the still frame of an enclosure, or a photograph, or an essay.

Animal Stories is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.