The Zinophile: Collages Visual and Literary

Last weekend, I went to a reading in celebration of Atlas Review editor/Sunday Stories alumnus Dolan Morgan’s birthday. Also there was a pile of newspapers — specifically, one called New York City Fires, in which Morgan’s poetry rests beside the artwork of Tom Oristalgio. The poems in here take a lot of found material, juxtaposing 19th-century news articles with contemporary Yelp reviews of spaces at the same location. It sounds jarring, but it’s surprisingly effective, the gulf between the hyperbole […]

Continue Reading

The Zinophile: The Making of a Zine About Soup

Last month, Ami Greko and Rachel Fershleiser announced a fundraiser for Stock Tips, a zine that they were putting together that explores the world of soup. As both are friends of mine, I was immediately interested; as I now have the zine in my hands, I can also say that it’s a fine overview of soups. The title can be taken literally–there are, in fact, tips for making stock–but there are also recipes in abundance, trivia, and essays. (The more literary-minded […]

Continue Reading

The Zinophile: Talking All Things Guillotine With Sarah McCarry

You might know Sarah McCarry through her fiction – her novel All Our Pretty Songs was one of my favorite books of last year – or through her work as the editor of the Guillotine series of chapbooks, which includes work from the likes of Vanessa Veselka, Kate Zambreno, and Melissa Gira Grant. Consistently smart and challenging – and with an impressive design aesthetic at work – everything that Guillotine puts out has rapidly become a must-read for me. I checked in with McCarry […]

Continue Reading

The Zinophile: After the Radiator Hospital Show, Zines

Radiator Hospital made one of my favorite albums of 2013, Something Wild. Earlier this month, I saw them for the first time at Glasslands. It was a terrific show, incredibly catchy and energetic; I’ve described Radiator Hospital’s music to a few friends as finding a good space somewhere between The Weakerthans and The Microphones, and that aesthetic was definitely present on the night I saw them. After the show, I went over to the merch table to see what they […]

Continue Reading

The Zinophile: Talking “Things I Told My Mother” With Sarah Gerard

I first met Sarah Gerard in 2012. Since then, I’ve been consistently impressed by her essays and criticism, and I eagerly picked up her chapbook Things I Told My Mother when it was released late in 2013. It’s an account of a topless walk Gerard took across parts of Manhattan, and it’s concerned with finding a theoretical anchor for this as it is with describing the walk in all of its aspects. Given this and the news that Two Dollar Radio would be […]

Continue Reading

The Zinophile: Three Views of Language

There’s a phone number on the back cover of the latest issue of Gigantic; dial it and you’ll be given an archetypally robotic list of authors’ names to choose from. Select one from there, and one of the authors featured in the issue will provide a pre-recorded message — Mitchell S. Jackson delving into some of the nicknames and slang used in his contribution to this issue.  The theme of Gigantic‘s fifth issue is “Talk,” and it suffuses its pages, from snippets […]

Continue Reading

The Zinophile: Catching Up on Punk Rock

The first zines I read were about music, and were invaluable in pointing me towards a lot of the bands and music that have become essential to me over the years. The three zines covered here are, in their own way, a return to basics for me — three zines where the primary focus was music, even as each of them has their own thematic and aesthetic concerns as well.

Continue Reading

The Zinophile: The Graphics & The Deconstruction of Monsters

If this week is any indication, a brief autumn appears to have given way to an early onset of winter. Do I dare call it zine-reading weather? Is any kind of weather not well-suited to the reading of zines? (I mean, torrential downpours might pose some problems.) But right now, it’s time to put thoughts of zines past aside and turn towards the zines of today. We’ll start with one on the artistic side. Elizabeth Graeber’s A Coloring Book of People is […]

Continue Reading