Brad Zellar

As someone who came of age in the 1980s, this book was a fantastic and nostalgic step back in time. Records, rollerskating and finding passion and identity in the music - well, I really enjoyed this. Fans of music from the 60s, 70s and 80s will be delighted, amused and see a bit of themselves in the narrator's obsession and enthusiasm for spinning records and discovering new music. This book reads more like a memoir than fiction - and felt so believable as to be true. The story is also touching and full of heart.… (mer)

Men wearing suits jousting with sailfish. Head-on bridge collision. Men with linoleum. Kitchen murder-suicide. Firemen playing donkey baseball. Ideal woman in apron. Through more than 10,000 images, Irwin Denison Norling, the unofficial town photographer for Bloomington, Minnesota, captured the strange juxtapositions, incongruities, and dark corners of the developing suburban America of the 1950s and '60s. A competitive amateur glued to his police radio, Norling spent years examining the light and darkness, tragedies and desolation, rituals of community and celebration through the lens of his camera, deftly capturing the uneasy dichotomy between the familiar and subversive—the familiarly subversive. "That was the way it was. And the way it was, that's what I was after."

In 2002 veteran journalist Brad Zellar unearthed Norling's negatives from the archive of the Bloomington Historical Society. Compelled by the work of this man who had all but drifted into obscurity, Zellar collects the best of these images in Suburban World, a fascinating window into the uneasy contradictions in Norling's unforgettable and unselfconscious, funny and gritty, not-too-distant past.… (mer)

In House of Coates, writer Brad Zellar pieces together the story of legendary recluse Lester B. Morrison. Working from a handful of encounters and contradictory conversations, a sketchy paper trail and often confounding interviews with individuals who may or may not have been “associates” of Morrison (including Morrison’s former collaborator Alec Soth), Zellar attempts to reconstruct one episode from Morrison’s decidedly episodic life. In the winter of 2011, Zellar finally crossed paths with his evasive subject, and was –with Morrison’s permission– granted access to the results of an MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) test that Morrison submitted to in August of 2009, along with the administrating psychiatrist’s copious notes. Finally, in late December of last year, Zellar received in the mail a duct-taped shoebox –marked “PERISHABLE”– containing almost two hundred photographs that Morrison termed “disposable documents of the approximate period in question.”

From these raw materials designer Hans Seeger has assembled a book that Morrison himself has pronounced, “Probably close enough to what might or might not have happened, and that’s as much as I’ve learned to expect from the so-called ‘real world.’”… (mer)