ZE Books – förlag

This book is an intimate portrait of grief, a chronicle that charts the devastation visited upon a large, multi-generational family in the wake of the senseless, random murder of twenty-one-year-old Tyler Kobe Nichols on December 23, 2020.With the cooperation and full participation of the Nichols-Chambers family, photographer Spencer Ostrander was granted privileged access to the household. Over the course of the next several months, he conducted one-on-one interviews with each member of that household along with Tyler's closest friends and, in the natural light of those settings, compiled a large dossier of photographic portraits of each person involved in the story.The result is an astonishing ensemble of pictures and words that pierces through the cold statistics we use to talk about the wave of street violence spreading across the country to focus on one person, one family, one lost life, and transform the numbers into vivid, aching human reality.

“Enclosed in this beautiful package, please find: an agile mind, a perfect style, a canny and undeceivable heart, and a welcome, enduring presence in the reader’s life.” —Michael Chabon“Glenn O’Brien may be the most important cultural critic of celebrity culture who never accredited his importance... Could he also have been the most important magazine editor of the 1970’s and 1980’s? These two claims complicate one another. The celebrity culture he dissected mercilessly was the same one he was complicit in creating, at Interview, which O’Brien credits with inspiring People... This puts him in a neighborhood with figures like Marshall McLuhan and Andre Breton, who seem to stand both enmeshed in and to one side of their cultural moment.” —from the introduction, by Jonathan Lethem.Intelligence for Dummies is a portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last fifty years of cultural life, captured through a vivid selection of Glenn O’Brien’s writings on music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, the political temperature of America. O’Brien’s essays, aphorisms and tweets create a portrait of the artist as cultural bellwether, complimented by artwork and photographs from his collaborators. A full-color, hardcover edition, Intelligence for Dummies is a deeply personal look into Patti Smith and Jean Michel Basquiat’s New York, and the culture of money and celebrity politics that ensued.

From iconoclastic writer and musician Adele Bertei comes a wholly original hero's journey that wages war on the cliché of the “misery memoir.” Set in a 1960s and ’70s American neighborhood rife with poverty and violence, fatherless Irish mothers and Italian mobsters, and women crucified into madness by misogyny, Bertei speaks through her electrically alive avatar Maddie Twist to flip the victim script.Bertei reveals what it's like to be a queer teen at a time when discovery could be fatal. Maddie peers deeply into the American psyche, refusing to consent to the systems of harm. A compelling personal history of queer culture from a working-class view and a glimpse into worlds yet unseen, Twist is good medicine: for readers who've experienced similar traumas, for teens caught in the foster care system, for the formerly incarcerated looking for hope, for writers grappling with how to tell their own stories.

With Stay, acclaimed poet, artist, and bestselling memoirist Nick Flynn presents a self-portrait via a constellation of topics that have circled his work. Ranging from the impact of suicide and homelessness to addiction, political engagement, and the vital power of artistic friendships, Stay is a mixed-media retrospective that shows nothing is created in isolation.Mirroring Flynn’s life, this work of visual and literary memoir is populated by examples of his collaborations since the 1980s with such luminaries as the photographers Amy Arbus and Catherine Opie, composer Guy Barash, actor Robert De Niro, cartoonist Josh Neufeld, author Sarah Sentilles, filmmaker Paul Weitz, and artists John Baldessari, Marilyn Minter, and Bill Shuck. In Flynn’s refusal to conform to narrative or the safety of his own perspective, Stay grasps for an essential truth, an answer to what art, in the end, can and cannot reflect.

A variegated and delightful collection of magazine writer Jon Bradshaw’s essential writings, The Ocean Is Closed rediscovers a memorable talent and offers us an entrancing view of mid-century culture beyond the shadow of the literary canon. With droll wit and keen intelligence, Bradshaw’s cinematic prose brings the ’70s to vibrant life.Jon Bradshaw, a man of tremendous personal charm, good humor and rugged beauty, was a literary concoction of his own devising: the magazine writer as world-weary traveler and man about town. Adored by British royalty, magazine editors, movie executives, and professional mercenaries alike, Bradshaw first made a splash in London during the Swinging Sixties. Pals with the likes of Anna Wintour, Timothy Leary, Gore Vidal, and Martin Amis, his career flourished at a time when magazines were at the center of the cultural conversation, delivering stories that were talked about for weeks. For twenty years, he cut a distinctive figure in this world, before his untimely death. A forgotten master of longform magazine writing, Bradshaw is ripe for rediscovery as one of the sharpest chroniclers of his age.

A bewitching collage of fiction, memoir, essay, criticism, and visual art from an author unique in her “ability to evoke the hidden life, the life unseen, the life we don’t even know we are living.” (Parul Seghal, New York Times Magazine)In The Devil's Treasure—aptly subtitled A Book of Stories and Dreams—the iconic author Mary Gaitskill has created a chimerical hybrid of fiction, memoir, essay, criticism, and visual art that transcends categorization. This collage of four novels (one a work in progress), interspersed and thematically linked by a single short story, then woven together with the author's commentary, is a kind of director's cut revealing the personal and societal forces that went into each individual piece of work, an ongoing, passionate exploration of core human emotions and experience—the ideally, sometimes quixotically high, and the grossly, confusedly low.With the stylistic daring and preternatural acuity that has made her one of America's most original writers, Gaitskill has created a layered vision of modern life that simultaneously blends the huge prehistoric creatures that swim at the bottom of our collective ocean with the family that picnics on the beach while the podcast natters about politics and a perhaps dangerously curious child explores the lapping waves.

As a boy in preparatory day school in upstate New York in the 1970s, Wells’s teacher abuses and humiliates him for his size, forcing Wells, for the first time, to question his right to take up space in the world. Wells’s father, reading his weight as a clear deficit of masculinity, and perhaps sexuality, creates a workout regimen meant to bulk him up. When that doesn’t help, he has Wells seen by a slew of specialists, all claiming he is in perfect health, and yet the problem cannot be denied: he is simply too skinny.Wells’s complicated relationship with his charming but elusive mother does not help matters. As the eldest son, he is privy to the struggles of a fraying marriage in which he, however slight, plays a divisive role. Wells is sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where his size continues to generate controversy, from the merely rude to the violently abusive. And yet, even as he manages to establish an identity of his own, one which must invariably contend with gender norms and conventions, his father’s obsession with his size follows him to Europe, threatening to destroy the space he has painstakingly won for himself. As he grows into an adult, combating the intrusive liberties others take with his body, Jonathan must define masculinity for himself, ultimately coming to terms with the damage of a father’s love.

From iconoclastic writer and musician Adele Bertei comes a wholly original hero's journey that wages war on the cliché of the “misery memoir.” Set in a 1960s and ’70s American neighborhood rife with poverty and violence, fatherless Irish mothers and Italian mobsters, and women crucified into madness by misogyny, Bertei speaks through her electrically alive avatar Maddie Twist to flip the victim script.Bertei reveals what it's like to be a queer teen at a time when discovery could be fatal. Maddie peers deeply into the American psyche, refusing to consent to the systems of harm. A compelling personal history of queer culture from a working-class view and a glimpse into worlds yet unseen, Twist is good medicine: for readers who've experienced similar traumas, for teens caught in the foster care system, for the formerly incarcerated looking for hope, for writers grappling with how to tell their own stories.

With a foreword by the Honorable Ras J. Baraka, 40th Mayor of Newark, NJ, The War Is Here is Life magazine photographer Bud Lee's dramatic, empathetic, and still shocking record of the Newark uprising of 1967-a pivotal moment in a summer of protest and rage across the country, whose reverberations we still feel today.July 1967. After the arrest, beating, and imprisonment of cab driver John Smith by local police, the city of Newark-already a tinderbox-became a hotbed of protest and retaliation. Over five long days, 26 people were killed by police gunfire and hundreds more were injured, thousands arrested, and millions of dollars in property damage caused. The scars on the city remained for decades.Bud Lee, a 26-year-old novice photographer for Life magazine, was called upon to cover the civic uprising in Newark as it broke out. Lee and Life reporter Dale Wittner arrived to find a majority Black population-already struggling under a corrupt local government and a vicious, authoritarian police force-trying to persevere in extraordinary circumstances: stores burned and looted; a city under siege by trigger-happy city and state police; and the young, inexperienced, and exhausted National Guardsmen sent to patrol it day and night.The War Is Here documents the several days Bud Lee spent in Newark. These photographs capture life in a city transformed into an urban war zone. Lee witnessed first-hand two policemen shoot a man named Billy Furr in the back. Lee's dramatic images of this cold-blooded murder ran in Life. The same bullets also hit and wounded a 12-year-old boy named Joey Bass Jr., who had been playing at a nearby intersection. Lee's stark, emotional image of Bass, lying bleeding and contorted in pain on dirty concrete, ran on the July 28, 1967 cover of Life, sparking a national conversation on race and police violence and becoming the defining image of the "long, hot summer" of '67-a summer of fire and fury, protest and rage across the country. Over half a century later, Bud Lee's raw, desolate, and empathetic photographs of the people of Newark, at a turning point in the city's history, continue to resonate: a testament to their resilience and fortitude.

Benjamin and Dita Stern are seasoned New Yorkers whose life in the pre-war, Upper East Side building Benjamin’s grandfather built has settled into stasis—two children no longer at home, professional lives never fully realized. Then Benjamin's brash younger brother Spence, founder and CEO of the hearing aid company Belphonics, asks him to collaborate on a new product line inspired by the brothers' rock-and-roll youth at CBGB's—the club where, Spence believes, his hearing was permanently damaged. If the idea works, it might salvage Benjamin and Dita's tenuous financial position. Yet they both know that getting involved in Spence's schemes comes at a high price.A funny and deeply felt debut novel from poet and memoirist Jonathan Wells, The Sterns Are Listening explores a family on the verge of both collapse and regeneration. Brimming with affection for its troubled characters and the troubled city they call home, the novel traces a courageous path to the deeply uncomfortable heart of the matter, one that just might lead to redemption.

Many know Jonathan Lethem as one of our most celebrated and eclectic writers, whose iconic novels—Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, among many others—play with genres and storytelling modes like a DJ mixing music. But Lethem grew up in his father’s studio, went to art school, and, in his own words, “made hundreds if not thousands of drawings, collages, paintings, hand-drawn comics, and even two animated shorts” before diverting, at nineteen, to prose. The surreal and form-defying panoply of his stories, essays, and novels celebrates—and mourns—this forsaken world of the visual and plastic arts. That leap, between the cellophane ephemerality of language and the brick-like tangibility of visual art, which operates as a sublimated wellspring for Lethem’s writing, is the subject of this book.Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture mortars together Lethem’s fictions in response to (and in exchange for) artworks by his friends with dozens of original essays ranging from comics and graffiti art, to his collaborations with artists and interventions into visual culture, to his portrait of the museum that was and continues to be his home, untethered from geography. Unique in Lethem’s kaleidoscopic oeuvre, Cellophane Bricks comprises a kind of stealth memoir of his parallel life in visual culture. Gorgeously designed, with stunning, full-color images from the author’s own collection and elsewhere, Cellophane Bricks is a ravishing assemblage that makes the perfect gift for story lovers of all kinds.

“The War and Peace of world music.” —Jim Irvin, MojoWinner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor / Virgil Thomson Book Award. From the legendary producer of Nick Drake, R.E.M., Toots and the Maytals, and Pink Floyd, and author of White Bicycles, comes a riveting, world-spanning tour de force illuminating the artists, histories, controversies, and collaborations that shaped global music.When Paul Simon first heard the Zulu accordion flourish that would open his multi-platinum album Graceland, he told Joe Boyd that it seemed to proclaim, “You haven’t heard this before!” Yet the “world music” boom of the 1980s that Simon’s album helped to usher in had roots that extended back through the decades and across continents: tango on the eve of World War I, Latin dance across the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, reggae in the ’70s, pre-War samba and pre-Beatles bossa nova, Eastern European ensembles filling capitalist concert halls during the Cold War, Indian ragas changing rock and roll in the 1960s, gypsy music inspiring classical composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. As far back as 1853, the music that had intrigued Simon had captivated London during a Zulu choir’s extended run there. (Only Charles Dickens dissented.) Like that of other far-flung musical traditions sweeping the globe, the story of Zulu music and its relationship to neighbors, invaders, appropriators, and admirers—from brutal 19th century massacres to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”—is more controversial, colorful, and complex than many imagine.Joe Boyd was part of a small group of label heads and journalists who chose “world music” as their marketing slogan in the 1980s. Already the legendary producer of artists including Pink Floyd, The Incredible String Band, Soft Machine, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Toots and the Maytals, and many others, Boyd had little idea how fast and how wide those simple words would spread, or how far back the history went. He would soon learn, producing pathbreaking music in Cuba, Brazil, Bulgaria, Mali, Hungary, Spain, and India under his label Hannibal Records.Following the success of his book White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, a self-published smash hit, Boyd now sets out to explore the stories behind the world music he had helped to popularize. He has traveled across continents and interviewed dozens of musicians, producers, and academics, and spent years reading, listening, and writing. The one-of-a-kind result is And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: a riveting, symphonic, globetrotting tour of the music that shapes our world.

From the author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ comes a globe-spanning memoir of identity, exile, and reinvention.In many ways, Hooman Majd has led a charmed life: the son of a high-ranking diplomat in pre-Revolutionary Iran, he grew up in the upper echelons of Iranian society and in cosmopolitan diplomatic enclaves in San Francisco, London, and Washington, DC. In early adulthood, after Ayatollah Khomeini’s Revolution in 1979, Majd sold real estate to fellow Iranian exiles in Beverly Hills, tried his hand at writing, and found his way to the orbit of Chris Blackwell, the impresario of Island Records and mastermind behind the careers of Bob Marley & the Wailers, U2, and other global superstars. After rising through the ranks—and sometimes, but not always, the charts—Majd went on to write three influential books about his homeland and served as a consultant and contributor to NBC News on Iran. Yet, for all this authority and access, Majd could never truly call any place “home.”As he recounts in his open-hearted memoir Minister without Portfolio—named for the tongue-in-cheek title Blackwell bestowed on him—Hooman Majd was always shadowed by a sense of precarity, even as he bantered with ambassadors’ wives at smoke-filled soirees or traded gossip with Grace Jones and Dennis Hopper at Goldeneye, Blackwell’s Jamaican estate and the former home of Ian Fleming. Majd had seen first-hand the havoc wrought on his family—and so many others—by the Iranian revolution. All his life, he has been questioned, frisked, or even threatened at points of entry. Though he has risked several return trips to Iran, today, officially, he can never go back. How can you build an identity when no place will claim you as its own?Told with grace, insight, and longing—and filled with riotous, sometimes shocking portraits of larger-than-life personalities and illuminating insights about the entanglements between Iran and the West—Minister without Portfolio is a trenchant memoir of belonging nowhere and everywhere at once.

A visionary life at the intersection of art, technology, and feminism.In Private I, Lynn Hershman Leeson — one of the most influential conceptual artists of our time—shares her personal journey and the struggle for her visionary work to be recognized as art. In the 1970s, women artists were often dismissed unless linked to more successful male counterparts. Defying this marginalization, Hershman Leeson carved her own path, creating groundbreaking conceptual works such as her Roberta Breitmore series, the Video Diaries, and films starring Tilda Swinton, including Conceiving Ada and Teknolust. Her innovative installations took place in unconventional venues—hotels, department store windows, San Quentin State Prison, and housing projects—while she raised her daughter and endured long periods of poverty.To support fellow artists, she launched The Floating Museum, bringing site-specific art to reclaimed public spaces. She was also one of the first to document women artists’ lives and work in her acclaimed documentary !W.A.R. (Women, Art, Revolution). Private I traces her lifelong commitment to experimentation—embracing film, video, AI, chatbots, touch screens, even her own DNA—to challenge ideas of identity and warn of the perils of technology and surveillance. At its core, Private I is a moving portrait of resilience, artistic innovation, and personal transformation through friendship, family, and fearless creativity.

Writer and musician Brian Cullman's rapturous evocation of life in the bike lane, before the world was digital, when music was everything and magic was everywhere, encompassing friendships with Lester Bangs, Nick Drake, Big Joe Turner, Tim Hardin, and Paul Bowles. When people asked Brian Cullman his favourite song, he would say the radio. It was all one sound. It was all one song: the drums and the words, the words without words, the rhythm and the static and the joy and amplified tears. TV was a clunky box in the corner, nothing but images on a screen telling the same story over and over. The stories were old and small, over before they began. Yesterday's gossip and twice cold toast. They gave him nothing. But Smokey Robinson crying like a flower with a hangover, The Ronettes, so carnivorous & tender, the sound of eternity in bed with the night: this was love and death and a ticket to places the buses don't go. These were the dreams of the dead, the regrets of the living, stolen prayers from the broken church where God & The Devil relax after work and trade places. He went to sleep to it, woke up to it. The idiot announcers and jingles and calls from New Jersey, the news and guitars, all one. He wanted to walk in it, dance in it.

Tastykakes, Soul Songs and Shining Stars is a rich and passionate record of a life-long obsession with soul music and Rhythm & Blues from music industry stalwart and legendary A&R man Joe McEwen. At various times in his lengthy career McEwen has worked with Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, K.D. Lang, Wilco, Nick Lowe, Built To Spill, Queen Latifah, the Frank Sinatra catalogue, and many others.Tastykakes, Soul Songs and Shining Stars is a labor of love, half a century in the making, for music industry veteran Joe McEwen. A Philadelphia native and legendary A&R executive for Columbia, Sire/Warner Brothers, Verve, and Concord Music Group, McEwen now gathers a lifetime’s worth of encounters, essays, and reveries into one radiant collection—a love letter to the rhythm-and-blues and soul music that shaped him.Its pages are bursting with vivid, compelling, up-front and personal profiles and encounters with a host of important figures: Pops and Mavis Staples, George Clinton, Allen Toussaint, Betty Wright, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Don Covay, and many more. Alongside these portraits are heartfelt musings spanning the 1960s through the ’80s, illuminating the creative processes behind the songs that defined a generation.Interwoven throughout are reflections on basketball, memory, and movement—parallel sources of rhythm, improvisation, and joy. The book culminates in an extended 2024 conversation with esteemed music author and longtime confidant Peter Guralnick (Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke), a fitting finale to a collection that captures the soul of a lifetime in music.

'The best writer about pop music . . . an inspiration' Jarvis Cocker, BBC Radio 6 MusicBefore rock criticism had rules, Nik Cohn was already breaking them. Corner Boy gathers Nik Cohn's nonfiction from the 1960s to the present into a riotous self-portrait. Moving from Derry to London, New York, and New Orleans, he writes about pop stars and boxers, club kids and hustlers, painters, prophets, disco dancers, drag queens, lowlifes, nobodies, and the half-mythic figures who live at the edge of the action.The book draws from across Cohn's career, including Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, his groundbreaking history of pop music; Today There Are No Gentlemen, about English men's fashion; The Heart of the World, a soul-biography of Broadway; Yes We Have No; and Triksta, about his misadventures in the New Orleans rap scene. The book includes the new essay "Apprehension," a narrative of his 1983 arrest in New York for drug trafficking.Edited by distinguished critic Ben Ratliff, the collection features long-form conversations that bridge Nik Cohn's peripatetic, Zelig-like life. Complete with full-color images drawn from Muriel, his ever-evolving, sixty-year photo-collage, Corner Boy is the vivid record of a life spent bearing witness.