Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction "Hearken ye fellow misfits, migrants, outcasts, squint-eyed bibliophiles, library-haunters and book stall-stalkers: Here is a novel for you."--Wall Street Journal "A tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bola o and Borges." --New York Times Book Review Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction * Longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award * An Amazon Best Book of the Year * A Publishers Weekly Bestseller Named a Best Book by: Entertainment Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Boston Globe, Fodor's, Fast Company, Refinery29, Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Book Riot, The Millions, Electric Literature, Bitch, Hello Giggles, Literary Hub, Shondaland, Bustle, Brit & Co., Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Read It Forward, Entropy Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, iBooks and Publishers Weekly From an award-winning young author, a novel following a feisty heroine's quest to reclaim her past through the power of literature--even as she navigates the murkier mysteries of love. Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn't fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago. Books are Zebra's only companions--until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she's unhinged; she thinks he's pedantic. Neither are wrong; neither can let the other go. They push and pull their way across the Mediterranean, wondering with each turn if their love, or lust, can free Zebra from her past. An adventure tale, a love story, and a paean to the power of language and literature starring a heroine as quirky as Don Quixote, as introspective as Virginia Woolf, as whip-smart as Miranda July, and as spirited as Frances Ha, Call Me Zebra will establish Van der Vliet Oloomi as an author "on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement" (Bustle).

The most important thing we can say about Call Me Zebra is that no one at NUBClub would defend it as a good book. Reviews were mixed from slightly below average to terrible, but everyone reported having trouble getting through the novel. Probably the biggest issue was that we all eventually recognized that the novel was supposed to be a comical parody, but none of us found it very funny and some of us didn't even realize it was supposed to be comedy until almost the end of the book. The interesting thing was that when Jill pointed out the scenes that she found funny -- the narrator screaming "tacos?!?" at the graduate students trying to have lunch with her, the missing bird in the apartment -- we immediately saw how they could have been funny. But as soon as we turned to the text to reread those scenes to discover what we missed, we would read Zebra's voice, and unstoppable groans cut us short. The writing is just so labored, so overly flowery with pointless references, anything else the text was trying to do is buried in the words. We assumed that Van der Vliet Oloomi was trying to parody a certain kind of intellectual iconoclastism, but it's just such a hard voice to read that none of us cared what it said. It was impossible to go more than 10 pages without hitting another Matrix of Literature round of self-flagellation and another four pointless literary reference in the middle of pile of pseudo-philosophical babble. A good number of us admitted to skimming the book in the end, which is saying a lot given the number of dense books this club has read. Additionally, many of us found the beginning of the novel very off tonally. The story of Zebra's family fleeing Iran and the death of the war are just very heavy elements with little comedy (excepting the house crest of the hung mallard), and since that's the first thing we get in the book, it was hard for many of us to make the switch to a more parodic content later on. If the exodus and sacrifices of the introduction are emotionally real, isn't the diasporic experience of Zebra sympathetic? And if we're supposed to find her clownish, why is that truly moving intro our first vision? The deep inconsistency here led many of us to misunderstand much of the novel, and even after realizing it was a comedy, we still couldn't shake the tragedy of the work. There were certainly interesting ideas about diaspora and rootlessness in the novel, but unfortunately the terrible voice of the narrator and the tonal u-turn left us all hoping that the Matrix of Literature would leave out this book.