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 insisted 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.

Inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, Kate Zamreno’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, Claudia Rankine, Peter Handke, Chantal Akerman, and more.

“‘But still it interests me’--- so writes Kate Zambreno in Appendix Project, a powerful, necessary, and defiantly unlimited defense of what Richard Howard, translating Roland Barthes, called continuance. By way of the books she persists in reading and rereading, the mother whom she is still mourning, the questions she keeps on asking, rephrasing, finding new ways of asking, Zambreno claims her right to stay with what is not yet exhausted. This is a book about how things—interests, attachments, experiences, projects—don’t finish; in Zambreno’s hands, this means it is also a book about openness.” — Kate Briggs