Appendix Project

Kate Zambreno

ISBN 10: 1913513688 / ISBN 13: 9781913513689

Published by Prototype Publishing Ltd., GB, 2025

About this Item

'Kate Zambreno's Appendix Project and Book of Mutter are meditations on grief, motherhood, and memory alongside and through Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary. These are also books about reading and seeing. To enter them is to be in the company of a writer with a tremendous capacity and gift for questioning, thinking, and feeling. These are extraordinary works.' - Christina SharpeInspired 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.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781913513689

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Appendix Project
• Publisher: Prototype Publishing Ltd., GB
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1913513688
• ISBN 13: 9781913513689
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 155 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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

Beginning on March 16, 2017, the fifteenth anniversary of her mother's death, Kate Zambreno gave a series of talks on and around the material in her Book of Mutter, which had just been published. Book of Mutter, a tender, disquieting meditation on the capacity of writing, photography, and memory to embrace the shadows while in the throes of grief, was composed over thirteen years. Many things Zambreno explored in the process of writing that book were left out. In Appendix Project, which was written much faster, during the first year of her daughter's life and in a state of exhausted “aphasic openness,” she picks up these threads.

Everything, in this state, is at once blurred and frozen in time. It's no coincidence that Appendix Project begins with a brilliant consideration of On Kawara's Today Series of 3,000 paintings that bear only the date. Investigating the ongoing project of writing about grief, Zambreno considers the nature of time, memory, the maternal, and death over the course of her daily life, and through her readings of other writers and artists. In Appendix Project, she comes close to the heart of writing itself.