Nonfiction by Kate Zambreno, reviewed by Anthony Brown
ANIMAL STORIES (Transit Books)
Somewhere between the latest Crumbl cookie line-up and a bombed-out building, I pause my scroll to look at Moo Deng, the plump pygmy hippo that first went viral in September 2024. In this video, Moo Deng bites at a guy who’s flicking her adorable ears. While this specific celebrity animal does not appear in Kate Zambreno’s Animal Stories, I see Moo Deng differently now that I’ve finished this brief yet expansive book.
A rumination on what it might mean to observe animals in captivity, Animal Stories divides its observations into two parts. The first (“Zoo Studies”) weaves together field notes from the author’s own zoo visits, meditations on the ethics of zoo photography, and reflections on the disturbing history of animal exhibition. Here Zambreno narrates, in wrenching detail, the plights of some famous animals. They reveal, for instance, how Jumbo the elephant, before he came to lend his name to all big things, was captured and transplanted from the Sudanese border to the London Zoo. By Zambreno’s account, Jumbo despised this imperial playground where he was imprisoned from 1860 to 1882. Made to serve as a carnival ride for Victorian children during the day, Jumbo would grind his tusks against the stone walls of his enclosure at night until a zookeeper anesthetized him with whiskey.
Much like the other exhibition sites Zambreno scrutinizes, the London Zoo emerges less as a monument to natural conservation and family fun and more as a zone of cruelty and listlessness. Yet for all its hassled monkeys, overwhelmed sea lions, and overheated grizzly bears, Zambreno’s project in part one amounts to something more complicated than an exposé. “Zoo Studies” makes no plaintive appeal for zoo reform. Instead, one of Zambreno’s key insights is that zoos encourage repetitive, self-mutilating behavior in animals while boring humans and making us sad. “For most adults, the zoo is extremely tedious,” Zambreno remarks. “It’s more often than not a bad time, like so much child-oriented tourism and entertainment. The zoo in the summer is hot. The animals are uncomfortable. They haven’t gotten enough exercise, but neither do they want to walk (I’m talking about the children here).”
According to Zambreno, even the kids, ostensibly the primary benefactors of the zoo’s dubious delights, respond to zoos with disquiet. So why do we keep constructing these enclosures? Why can’t we seem to look away from what has been locked inside? And why do we photograph ourselves before the exhibits, the better to watch ourselves watching? A memoirist and performance studies scholar, Zambreno mines vast archives of personal experience and zoo-related art and writing for answers to these questions. But answers remain elusive. The zoo continues to exert its strange pull. On a trip to the Bronx Zoo, Zambreno succumbs to the inertia and corrals their children into a “competition for iPhone selfies, using the animals as backdrop.” Hot and overstimulated, the animals keep out of sight, unable or unwilling to perform for the photo op. Zambreno muses on this refusal in a way that is characteristically citational, turning to the work of theorist John Berger: “It is because the animals are marginalized, Berger writes, that they go toward the edges of their enclosures. Perhaps, toward the edges, the animals can be, if not free, out of sight from the crowds of onlookers.”
If Zambreno unifies part one around the phenomenon of zoo-going, the locus of part two is somewhat harder to pin down, like an insect wriggling free of its display case. “My Kafka System” leaves behind the lengthier reports on zoos in favor of quick, if still carefully crafted, notes. These touch on Franz Kafka’s neurasthenic diary entries, Zambreno’s own experience as an adjunct instructor, the physical and mental strain of caring for young children in a post-pandemic world, and a turn-of-the-twentieth-century exercise regime for gentleman dandies. Considered as a whole, these notes create a fractured essay that juxtaposes Kafka’s working life with Zambreno’s. For instance, in describing a time when university administration compelled them to teach virtually while struggling with a painful bladder infection, Zambreno writes:
“What was remote were our bodies, our vulnerable health, often related to our precarious status at these institutions, and what the material conditions of our lives were like, all of which we were supposed to hide from view. Obviously I was not able to bring up to the students this communication with human resources or my later correspondence with the dean that afternoon, but if I had, I daresay it could have contributed to a deeper understanding of Kafka’s story of overwork and alienation.”
The disjuncture between parts one and two means that the book resists too-easy interpretation overall. What distinguishes Zambreno’s approach is just this associative quality, its stitching-together of seemingly disparate elements. The author acts less as a didactic guide through the assembled materials, more as a kind of quilting point. Reading Animal Stories gives us the sense of being inside the head of a preoccupied researcher. Voyeurs all, we peer on as Zambreno attempts to wrangle their wide-ranging curiosity and considerable breadth of knowledge in pursuit of some deeper solution or truth, of what lurks behind these phenomena of alienation and overwork.
A certain futility attends their lonely hunt after an answer. The book performs this futility at the level of its prose, which is everywhere punctuated with qualifying phrases: “I attempt,” “I believe,” “I daresay.” In case we had forgotten about the human being behind the page, these moments of intellectual vulnerability increasingly serve to remind us. Nowhere is the author’s own growing sense of insecurity, exasperation, and overwhelm more apparent than when they describe the conclusion to the lecture they were required to give while sick. Here the investigation seems to unspool at the very sentence level, as Zambreno struggles to communicate with their students across a tenuous Zoom connection:
“I perform the demise of Gregor Samsa, while the screen freezes and flickers, while my voice becomes a weird tinny thing, garbled and unrecognizable. Did you get any of that? I said mournfully at the end, all of the screens almost dark, but it sputtered out again, before any of them could say, or maybe they just didn’t say anything at all, or maybe I was unable to comprehend their voices.”
While Animal Stories fails to provide pat solutions for how to live within a capitalist system marked by crisis and captivity, Zambreno’s book succeeds precisely because it is more than the sum of its parts.
Animal Stories was published in September 2025 by Transit Books.
Anthony Brown is a writer, K-12 tutor, and graduate student based in Detroit. He is a former managing editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal and a current reader for Cleaver Magazine. In his free time, he enjoys hanging out at Affirmations, a queer community center serving Southeast Michigan.
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