Appendix Project: Talks and Essays

On the ongoing project of writing about grief; Zambreno’s addendum to Book of Mutter.

“I came up with the idea of writing these notes, or talks, out of a primary desire to not read from Book of Mutter, and instead to keep gesturing to its incompleteness and ongoingness, which connects, for me, to the fragmentary project of literature, and what I long for in writing.”
–from Appendix Project

Inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Kate Zambreno’s Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, Zambreno’s book on her mother that took her over a decade to write. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of her child’s life, contain Zambreno’s most original and dazzling thinking and writing to date. In Appendix Project Zambreno thinks through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.