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ZE Books congratulates its authors on a landmark 2026, earning praise from outlets spanning Vanity Fair to How Long Gone and Rolling Stone to Dream Baby Press. In ZE’s most ambitious year to date, the publishing house launched their paperback series with Brian Cullman’s How to Prepare for the Past: Travels in Music and Time and Joe McEwen’s Tastykakes, Soul Songs & Shining Stars: Affections and Reflections 1973–2025; celebrating those releases with events at landmark New York institutions like the New York Public Library and Housing Works. In the fall, ZE released Nik Cohn’s Corner Boy: Loiterings New and Old (edited by Ben Ratliff) and Jerry Stahl’s Gonzo Neurotic: The Best (and Not So Best) of Jerry Stahl. Those collections were met with a dual rave review from Dwight Garner in the New York Times - who praised them both for their ability to “revel in life’s margins and recapture auras past.”
Brian Cullman - How to Prepare for the Past: Travels in Music and Time
An acclaimed musician, journalist and quintessential (tenth-generation) New Yorker, Brian Cullman’s How to Prepare for the Past captures an era when music was pervasive and insistently urgent, tracing his life through friendships and first-hand encounters with luminaries like Nick Drake, Lester Bangs, Miles Davis, Tim Hardin, Chuck Berry, George Martin, Bo Diddley and more. These include his years as Crawdaddy's London correspondent with Drake, John Martyn and the members of Fairport Convention, his time as a fly on the wall watching Doc Pomus and Dr. John write songs together in Pomus' NYC apartment, late nights in English hotels with Van Morrison picking up his tab (unbeknownst to Mr. Morrison), eating hot dogs with Big Joe Turner on Third Ave, and the centuries-old sounds from the mountains of Jajouka, Morocco.
American Songwriter praised this collection for capturing “the details that stay with you” and Aquarium Drunkard described it as feeling “like something out of a hipster Walk Hard remake.” Highlights included an in-depth conversation for New York’s WFUV, an intimate celebration at Via Carota and an in-conversation event with author Alan Light at Housing Works Bookstore.
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Joe McEwen - Tastykakes, Soul Songs & Shining Stars: Affections and Reflections 1973–2025
Respected A&R executive, DJ and music journalist Joe McEwen’s vivid reflections on the music that shaped him. Within the book's pages, McEwen gathers a lifetime’s worth of encounters, essays, and reveries into one radiant collection, a love letter to rhythm-and-blues and soul music. It bursts with vivid, compelling, up-front and personal profiles (predominantly written by McEwen while working as a music journalist in the 1970s) with a host of indelible figures: Pops and Mavis Staples, George Clinton, Allen Toussaint, Betty Wright, Michael Jackson, Gamble and Huff, Don Covay and many more. In the years following, McEwen worked with groundbreaking artists including Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, Wilco, Tedeschi Trucks Band and Dinosaur Jr. for labels like Columbia, Sire/Warner, Verve and Concord Music Group.
Highlights for this “fascinating” (Philadelphia Inquirer) piece of writing included an exclusive excerpt with Rolling Stone, an in-depth conversation with David Fricke for SiriusXM radio, a Nashville panel at AmericanaFest with Robert Gordon and a release celebration with Steve Greenberg at the New York Public Library’s Jefferson Market branch.
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Nik Cohn - Corner Boy: Loiterings New and Old
An extraordinary collection from Nik Cohn chronicling his seven decades as an “underground hero…and messenger for the gospel of street culture” (New York Times). Edited by Ben Ratliff, Cohn’s longtime fan and friend (himself a revered and groundbreaking author), the pages of Corner Boy find Cohn interacting with boxers, self-styled prophets, outsider artists, fetish models, disco dancers, street singers, seminal figures in rock and roll (Phil Spector, Pete Townshend, The Rolling Stones); the famous and infamous, the celebrated and the unknown. The earliest pieces were written while Cohn was still in his teens, already a star, strutting his stuff in various British newspapers and magazines (The Observer, The Sunday Times, Queen) while the most recent were completed within the past year — including “Apprehension,” an epic chronicle of his 1983 arrest on drug conspiracy charges.
Highlights included Cohn’s “surreal brush with the law” being excerpted by Vanity Fair, a sold-out release event at New York’s prestigious 92nd Street Y (recording now live under the Y’s archive here) and additional praise from Salon (“alive with mystery, intrigue and revelation...electric”) to SPIN (“It’s all gold...every person he writes about in Corner Boy could have a film built around them”).
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Jerry Stahl - Gonzo Neurotic: The Best (and Not So Best) of Jerry Stahl
Dubbed “a better-than-Burroughs virtuoso” by The New Yorker, Jerry Stahl returned this year with a career-spanning collection resurrecting more than fifty years of long-lost writing from one of America’s great cult literary voices. Spanning the 1970s to the 2020s, Stahl takes readers from the "wet heart of Pageantland" at Miss America to the set of ALF (Alien Life Form), through unforgettable encounters with figures like Marlon Brando, David Bowie, Mickey Rourke, Samuel L. Jackson, and Benicio del Toro, while also exploring his own struggles with addiction, fatherhood, Jewish identity and survival.
Highlights from this collection, which The New York Times praised as “Hunter S. Thompson meets Anthony Bourdain…his own vivid comic invention” and SPIN lauded for its “humor and biting prose,” included a conversation on the leading culture podcast How Long Gone, a spotlight in The New Yorker’s “What We’re Reading” roundup and a dreambabypress feature with Founder Matt Starr, deeming Stahl “one of the most brilliant and funny writers around today.” To celebrate the release, Stahl joined actor Eric Bogosian for an in-conversation event in NYC, and in LA, he sat down with actor and comedian Marc Maron, which The Los Angeles Times named one of the best literary events of the fall.
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ABOUT ZE Books:
Founded in 2019 by Michael Zilkha, ZE Books publishes extraordinary literary and visual works by groundbreaking writers, journalists, artists, musicians, and thinkers from around the world. Titles span art, experimental writing, poetry, fiction, memoir, with an increasing focus on music.
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