Zito Madu

1 month ago | flaminghydra.com | Zito Madu

Most of the actors I’ve seen play Iago, the villain of Shakespeare’s Othello, portray him as a serpentine character—literally, as an extension of the serpent in the garden of Eden, a slippery, slithering trickster and deceiver who leads everyone to their destruction with his schemes and cleverness.

2 months ago | fivebooks.com | Manjula Martin |Wei Tchou |Zito Madu |Erika Morillo

Thanks for talking us through the 2025 shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize for Autobiography—has it been a good year for memoir and autobiography? It’s been one of the best years for memoir and autobiography in recent memory! It’s been a delight to read so many interesting, well-written, imaginatively constructed, and thought-provoking memoirs. What were the judges looking for, when they came to compile the shortlist? We weren’t looking for any one particular thing.

Feb 7, 2025 | washingtonpost.com | Zito Madu

Writing is a famously miserable profession, but Osamu Dazai stands out as one of the most despondent writers ever to live. That strain is everywhere in evidence in his work, but it is on special display in “No One Knows,” a collection of 14 short stories written in the first person, newly translated from Japanese by Ralph McCarthy.

Oct 16, 2024 | minormedicine.substack.com | June Everett |Nathaniel Friedman |Zito Madu

Writer and ex-pro athlete Zito Madu stops by to share his unified theory of sports humanism talk about exercise. Topics covered include:-The relationship between pleasure and health-Working out as false consciousness-The vast and untapped health benefits of playing a sport-Why Randy Moss is the all-time greatest cornerbackPlus 20 minutes of vintage NBA content!

Sep 10, 2024 | somethingwonderful.substack.com | Zito Madu

I always forget that I still have this substack, so here’s a short story that I worked on last night that may get taken down and edited some more at some point. Thanks for reading Zito’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. They don’t tell you that New York City is a very lonely place, he said. We were at Paul’s Cocktail Lounge at the Roxy Hotel. The room looked as if it was designed by someone who watched too many episodes of Miami Vice.