"El flamant Premi d´Honor de les Lletres Catalanes, Quim Monzó, recomana 'Call me zebra' d'Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. — EMPORDA
Emporda
San Francisco Chronicle
"Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a new breed of erudite, conceptually ambitious authors...Above and beyond the sociopolitical undercurrent, Call Me Zebra is about the dead we love and communicate with each time we open a book (or access a memory).” —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
The New Yorker
"Van der Vliet Oloomi resists the standard redemption arc, infusing her protagonist with a darkly comic neuroticism." -THE NEW YORKER
New York Times Book Review
"Ferociously intelligent.... With intricacy and humor, Van der Vliet Oloomi relays Zebra’s brainy, benighted struggles as a tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges." --Liesl Schillinger, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
LA Review of Books
"Van der Vliet Oloomi captures the shattered identity of the refugee and the immigrant, the way that literature becomes a lifeline in exile: a movable home, a network of dissent, a genealogy beyond national borders."- LA REVIEW OF BOOKS
Library Journal
The National Book Review
"Van der Vliet Oloomi has delivered a slightly screwball novel with a quirky, irrepressible narrator, full of literary theories, boundless curiosity, and biting humor." THE NATIONAL BOOK REVIEW, "5 Hot Books"
Kirkus Reviews
"This is a brilliant, demented, and bizarro book that demands and rewards all the attention a reader might dare to give it." KIRKUS REVIEWS, STARRED REVIEW
Bomb Magazine
“(Don’t)… miss the realization that the beauty of Zebra’s character lies in the very fact that literature is hyperbolic. At any given time, there is always a character crying out; a war announcing itself; a family getting torn apart; a relationship ending. This threat of an imminently catastrophic dissolution keeps Zebra hooked to the books she carries with her and also makes her a magnetically passionate character worth following." — Bomb Magazine
Shelf Awareness
LA Review of Books - "The Call Me Zebra Author Excavates Her Buried Selves"
“Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi was born under the sign of exile. The author’s striking name combines Persian and Dutch, evoking two very different worlds which seep into her work in unwieldy and whimsical ways. Reading the Iranian-American’s new novel Call Me Zebra is a journey through what the writer calls the “psychosis of exile”—a dark descent into the depths of an identity crisis Oloomi is all too familiar with.” — LA Review of Books
The Millions
"Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s novel about a difficult, funny, and troubled woman is at its heart a novel about the powerful role of literature in self-discovery." THE MILLIONS, "Self Discovery and the Limitations of Literature: On CALL ME ZEBRA"
Publishers Weekly
Los Angeles Review of Books
"What Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts did for gender and sexuality, Call Me Zebra does for the experience of exile, deftly threading the narrative with theory while also using theory to pull the reader in. Though Call Me Zebra happens to be fiction, both books are stuffed with complex ideas made irresistible and lyric. Both symbiotically use philosophy to clarify and amplify the human story. " LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOK
The Wall Street Journal
"Hearken ye fellow misfits, migrants, outcasts, squint-eyed bibliophiles, library-haunters and book stall-stalkers: Here is a novel for you." —WALL STREET JOURNAL
LitHub
"This is a miss your stop on the subway and ignore your to-do list kind of book." LITHUB, 15 Books You should Read this February
Bitch Media
Music & Literature
“That’s the triumph of this novel, to animate the movement of a mind, and in this case, a mind plummeting into the abyss of madness while struggling to maintain its grip. There is mystery within Fra Keeler and it largely remains a mystery—about Fra Keeler, and just where did he die? Isn’t that the way of life?” — Music & Literature
