Margins
Appendix Project book cover
Appendix Project
Talks and Essays
2019
First Published
4.13
Average Rating
153
Number of Pages

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.

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Author

Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno
Author · 12 books
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.
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