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Call Me Zebra
by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Published: 2018-02-06
Hardcover : 304 pages
Hardcover : 304 pages
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“Hearken ye fellow misfits, migrants, outcasts, squint-eyed bibliophiles, library-haunters and book stall-stalkers: Here is a novel for you.”—Wall Street Journal
“A tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges.” —New York ...
“A tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges.” —New York ...
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Introduction
“Hearken ye fellow misfits, migrants, outcasts, squint-eyed bibliophiles, library-haunters and book stall-stalkers: Here is a novel for you.”—Wall Street Journal
“A tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges.” —New York Times Book Review
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction * Longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award * An Amazon Best Book of the Year * A Publishers Weekly Bestseller
Named a Best Book by: Entertainment Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Boston Globe, Fodor's, Fast Company, Refinery29,Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Book Riot, The Millions, Electric Literature, Bitch, Hello Giggles, Literary Hub, Shondaland, Bustle, Brit & Co., Vol. 1 Brooklyn,Read It Forward,Entropy Magazine,Chicago Review of Books, iBooks and Publishers Weekly
From an award-winning young author, a novel following a feisty heroine’s quest to reclaim her past through the power of literature—even as she navigates the murkier mysteries of love.
Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn’t fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago.
Books are Zebra’s only companions—until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she’s unhinged; she thinks he’s pedantic. Neither are wrong; neither can let the other go. They push and pull their way across the Mediterranean, wondering with each turn if their love, or lust, can free Zebra from her past.
An adventure tale, a love story, and a paean to the power of language and literature starring a heroine as quirky as Don Quixote, as introspective as Virginia Woolf, as whip-smart as Miranda July, and as spirited as Frances Ha, Call Me Zebra will establish Van der Vliet Oloomi as an author “on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement” (Bustle).
“A tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges.” —New York Times Book Review
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction * Longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award * An Amazon Best Book of the Year * A Publishers Weekly Bestseller
Named a Best Book by: Entertainment Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Boston Globe, Fodor's, Fast Company, Refinery29,Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Book Riot, The Millions, Electric Literature, Bitch, Hello Giggles, Literary Hub, Shondaland, Bustle, Brit & Co., Vol. 1 Brooklyn,Read It Forward,Entropy Magazine,Chicago Review of Books, iBooks and Publishers Weekly
From an award-winning young author, a novel following a feisty heroine’s quest to reclaim her past through the power of literature—even as she navigates the murkier mysteries of love.
Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn’t fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago.
Books are Zebra’s only companions—until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she’s unhinged; she thinks he’s pedantic. Neither are wrong; neither can let the other go. They push and pull their way across the Mediterranean, wondering with each turn if their love, or lust, can free Zebra from her past.
An adventure tale, a love story, and a paean to the power of language and literature starring a heroine as quirky as Don Quixote, as introspective as Virginia Woolf, as whip-smart as Miranda July, and as spirited as Frances Ha, Call Me Zebra will establish Van der Vliet Oloomi as an author “on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement” (Bustle).
Editorial Review
An Amazon Best Book of February 2018: In this delightfully weird and funny novel, a young Iranian exile named Zebra makes her way from New York to Barcelona to dive deep into the past, when generations of her brilliantly intellectual, underachieving forebears were “gored by history.” Thanks to her father’s relentless tutelage, Zebra has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of literature, but her embrace of fatalism has left her oddly uncertain about why or how to live. Enter Ludo, a sexy Italian philologist. His advice to Zebra (“You need to get out of your head and have some fun”) leads to an explosive clash of sensibilities. Zebra is off-kilter and eccentric in a way that we rarely see in female literary characters, but she’ll remind you of Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, whose picaresque adventures inspire her own. If you loved the balance of warmth and cleverness in Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, Call Me Zebra might be your next favorite novel. Endearingly deluded heroines are ultimately the most lovable, and you’ll be rooting for Zebra, and for love, until the end. —Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book ReviewDiscussion Questions
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