Call Me Zebra

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Named a Most Anticipated Title of 2018 by iBooks, Amazon Book Review, Book Riot, Bustle, PW, Nylon Magazine, Happy Giggle, The Millions, The Boston Globe, Bitch Media, Amazon, Chicago Review of Books, LitHub, Entertainment Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Elle Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Paperback Paris. One of The National Book Review's "5 Hot Books." One of Electric Literature's "46 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2018" and one of Bustle's "11 Books by Women of Color Everyone Needs to Read." An Amazon's #1 New Release in Absurdist Fiction and an Amazon Top 10 Pick for February. 

 

"This book will blow you away. Call Me Zebra is likely to be every book nerd’s bizarre dream." —BUSTLE

"This is a brilliant, demented, and bizarro book that demands and rewards all the attention a reader might dare to give it." —KIRKUS, Starred Review

"Hearken ye fellow misfits, migrants, outcasts, squint-eyed bibliophiles, library-haunters and book stall-stalkers: Here is a novel for you." —THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"Not many authors are compared to Borges, Cervantes, and Kathy Acker all in one breath, but that is exactly what we're dealing with here: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a twisted, twisty genius...[CALL ME ZEBRA] is a wild, trippy ride." —NYLON MAGAZINE

"Rich and delightful...crackles throughout with wit and absurdity...a sharp and genuinely fun picaresque, employing humor and poignancy side by side to tell an original and memorable story." —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, Starred Review

"A major work on the importance of literature." —THE BOSTON GLOBE

"What Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts did for gender and sexuality, Call Me Zebra does for the experience of exile." —THE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

"[CALL ME ZEBRA] is for every human whose first love in life will always be literature...A beautiful depiction of first love, legacy, and our desire to feel connected to where (and who) we come from." —SHONDALAND

"Acerbic wit and a love of literature color this picaresque novel...By turns, hilarious and poignant, painting a magnetic portrait of a young woman you can't help but want to know more about." —HARPER'S BAZAAR

"CALL ME ZEBRA is a novel in the best sense of the word. It's filtered entirely through an idiosyncratic mind, who thinks in sentences that are sharp and smart and utterly ridiculou." —REFINERY29

"A sexy complicated affair...geopolitically savvy."—ELLE MAGAZINE

 

**READ an excerpt of CALL ME ZEBRA HERE.

Fra Keeler

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In Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s debut novel Fra Keeler, a man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter’s death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow more strange, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.

Read reviews of Fra Keeler in the LA Times, The Millions, Music & Literature, DIAGRAM, and Bookslut. Read an excerpt in The Collagist. Read an interview with Azareen at Monkeybicycle.

"Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi writes sentences that are crisp and formal, but the madness they depict is anything but.  Her ambition of taking you inside a completely unreliable narrator never compromises her strong narrative drive. Controlled yet bizarre, it pulls you in. The judges admired her courage and formal daring, and the underpinnings of discipline that allow words to recur like waves on the shore while always seeming new.” WHITING WRITERS' AWARD SELECTION COMMITTEE

"A rare gem of a book that begs to be read again. A surrealist triumph."  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the descendent of writers as brilliant and disparate as Max Frisch, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Per Petterson. Fra Keeler is a compelling and humorously associative meditation on how 'one lives against one's dying,' and how that living will be in contra-distinction to all that explains that death on paper after its fact. Would that more book groups read books of this complexity and intelligence; discussion would reach on into the wee hours!" MICHELLE LATIOLAIS

“Obsessive. Surreal. Darkly comic. Chilling.” ROBERT COOVER

“A stunning psychological thriller.” LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Fra Keeler is mysterious, experimental, and surreal. [Van der Vliet Oloomi] might just be on the verge of developing a whole new literary movement." BUSTLE

"You ask: What sort of fiction are we reading here? Anticipating just this question, on her 'Acknowledgments' page, Oloomi provides a checklist of books and films that she says made this work 'possible': works by Cesar Aira, Thomas Bernhard, Luis Buñuel, Nikolai Gogol, Alfred Hitchcock, and Clarice Lispector, to name only a handful from her inventory of what one could call the 'literature of madness,' if 'madness' were not so reductive a term for the complexities to which Fra Keeler pays tribute." GERALD BRUNS

"Fra Keeler disturbs, distorts, and disrupts the reader's way of seeing." DINAW MENGESTU

“Fra Keeler firmly establishes Van der Vliet Oloomi in the tradition of writers like Nikolai Gogol, Clarice Lispector, Witold Gombrowicz, and Cesar Aira.”  THE COFFIN FACTORY

"Oloomi enters so fully and sympathetically into the mad logic of her narrator that scenic detail, chronology, cause and effect, and even such mundane props as cactus, mailman, and ringing phone are bent, doubled, or subsumed by the paranoid geometries of meaning he draws... Subtly menacing, but not without humor, the novel derives momentum and tension from the space between its clear, intelligent language and the absolute unreliability of its narrator." SLATE

"Fra Keeler reminded me of Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, Roberto Bolaño's The Third Reich, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Reticence, not to mention big classics like Lolita." THE MILLIONS

"Fra Keeler is wonderfully imaginative, the work of a terrific young writer." LYNNE TILLMAN

"In Fra Keeler a mind churns on itself, while reality—if it is reality—comes rushing at it with a strange stutter, everything a bit lost, a bit off, and ready to be ground up further by the uncertain perception of the narrator. This is a book by turns funny and strange, but always entertaining." BRIAN EVENSON

 

The Cleanse, Granta

We are in the heartland, bleeding out. We are seeds sprouted in torn lands. How did we come so far, cover so much distance? Habibti, we call out to each other, azizam. We say to one another, you are the source of my light. The goats were still baaing when we left, kicking against the rocks on the crest of the mountains, their beards wispy in the wind. There was the salt of the sea, the trembling line of heat. There was the hollow shaft of the gun barrel and the wayward man holding it. There were downcast mothers. There was the shell-shocked child with his mouth still smelling of suckled milk…

Read more… https://granta.com/the-cleanse/

Pluto, LARB Lit

THERE ARE TIMES when I think my life must have begun with a No.

I take this thought, which is also a feeling, with me everywhere I go. It is nestled somewhere deep in the grooves of my past. There are people who notice I carry around this ancient negation. They become curious the way I have seen certain adults become curious about wild animals that are about to go extinct. How terrible to know that a creature that has been there all along, suddenly, on the verge of its disappearance, becomes visible. I allow these people to approach me, but I don’t always answer their questions. I pick and choose. Over the years I have become more deliberate in my ways. If I tell an overly constructed person about my negation, they become uncomfortable. I interpret their discomfort to mean that their own void has suddenly become palpable to them; their gaze turns glassy, they detach. They look disturbing to me then, their eyes vacuous as if they have been unplugged from the world…

Read more… https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pluto/