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Jul 15, 2024 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Jeremy Dauber |Joshua Barton |Akiva Schick
HBO 12 seasons, 120 episodes It’s been twenty-five years since Larry David first strutted and fretted his way in front of the camera, appearing on Curb Your Enthusiasm, an HBO show whose title seemed to announce a particular kind of lowering of expectations, which bordered on, well, self-hatred. When Curb first aired in 1999, David was familiar to comedy connoisseurs as co-creator and co–head writer of Seinfeld—and the guy who failed to stick the landing of the iconic series.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
jewishreviewofbooks.com | Allan Nadler |Joshua Barton |Noah Feldman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 416 pp., $32 In the nineteenth century, a fascinating and significant minor genre of Hebrew literature emerged to address the seismic historical changes that were challenging modernizing European Jews’ fealty to God, Torah, and the Jewish nation. The new reality demanded guidance, and so guides were produced. Two particularly intriguing and impressive ones stand out.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
brokenpencil.com | Joshua Barton
Resist #50Infozine, Mat Resist, 62 pgs, Resist Transmogrification Laboratory, resistlaboratory.com, $5I am not handy; I can do very little with my hands in terms of making, fixing, repairing. Or rather, maybe I can do these things, but I don’t know how and am too afraid or have too little faith in myself to learn.
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Jan 7, 2024 | 
brokenpencil.com | Joshua Barton
TrainsComic, O. Ashby, 60 pgs, msha.ke/oashby, $52021 Broken Pencil award winner O. Ashby combines original illustration and poetry in her zine, Trains. You might call it a comic or almost a graphic novel, but it feels more to me like a small picture book for sentimental grown ups who miss home — particularly Midwestern homes with industry as a nextdoor neighbour.
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Oct 5, 2023 | 
brokenpencil.com | Joshua Barton
Strange and Mysterious Creatures: Green IssuePerzine, EA Douglas, 32 pgs, eadouglas.space, $12The fourth issue of EA Douglas’s Strange and Mysterious Creatures – the green issue for those following along with colour designations — opens with one of the best introductory passages you’ll find. It is about watching sunlight move across a bedroom. EA Douglas is an excellent writer.
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Sep 29, 2023 | 
brokenpencil.com | Joshua Barton
AtticusZine, Corinne Phillips, 22 pgsThis full-colour, richly collaged mini-zine is a touching tribute to a real-life friend, Atticus, and a rendering as fable of Atticus’s coming out and transitional journey. Printed on moderately weighted paper and handbound with stiff black thread, it has vibrantly coloured matte finished images.
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Sep 7, 2023 | 
brokenpencil.com | Joshua Barton
Ticket for ReferencePerzine, Kate Dunn, 30 pgs, etsy.com/shop/moonfurmonstersProlific Australian zinester Kate Dunn writes a frank but sentimental mini-memoir of her call centre work. Drawing on several years experience of frontline phone wrangling, caught between customers, bosses, and a year of middle management. All the while striving to hold on to empathy. Kate’s anecdotes are sly, surprising and sometimes sad.
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Aug 25, 2023 | 
brokenpencil.com | Joshua Barton
SolastalgiaPhotozine, Mar Wan, 56 pgs, fuegodelgado.bigcartel.com, $25Toronto-based photographer Mar Wan captures the damper that the COVID Era threw on city life and subculture. This darkest and most uncertain time is in these 56 pages of richly coloured photos. Street preachers, doom prophets, the masked and unmasked. Kids burning like hell to dance and cops breaking up the party. All in a city where the sun is out but no one’s sure if it’s safe to play.
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Aug 4, 2023 | 
brokenpencil.com | Joshua Barton
The Printer WhispererLitzine, Marie Blanchet, 40 pgs, blanchetmarie.com, $10Writer, illustrator and designer Marie Blanchet collects 31 spooky, surreal stories set in haunted, uncanny, but somehow still commonplace offices. And in an impressive flourish of constrained technique, she tells each story in exactly 100 words. There are printers possessed by spirits, whole offices floating through clouds, witches’ unions, office beasts that must not be awoken.
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Mar 8, 2023 | 
brokenpencil.com | Joshua Barton
MariaZine, Andromeda, 8 pgs, andromedazines.square.site, $8Prolific zinester Andromeda evokes bittersweet nostalgia and the tactility of family photo albums in this one-sheet 8-pager, . In an enigmatic vignette, parcelled out over several hand-cut, hand-pasted typewritten text blocks, a narrator — or perhaps Andromeda themselves — revisits the echo of a long-deceased aunt.
