Books by Zachary Lazar
Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder
When he was just six years old, Zachary Lazar's father, Edward, was shot dead by hit men in a Phoenix, Arizona parking garage. The year was 1975, a time when, according to the Arizona Republic, "land-fraud artists roamed the state in sharp suits, gouging money from buyers and investors." How did his father fit into this world and how could his son ever truly understand the man, his time and place, and his motivations?In Evening's Empire, Zachary Lazar, whose novel Sway was named one of the Best Books of 2008 by Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications, brilliantly attempts to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to his father's murder.
How did Ed Lazar, a fun-loving but meticulous accountant, become involved in a multi-million dollar real-estate scandal involving politicians and Mafia figures? How much did he know about his colleagues' illegal activities? Why had he chosen to testify against his former business partner, Ned Warren, Sr.? Warren was "a mystery man," according to 60 Minutes, widely known as "the Godfather of land fraud." The day before Ed Lazar was scheduled to appear in front of a grand jury he was killed in a "gangland-style murder," as reported by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Four hundred mourners attended a memorial service for him the next day. Evening's Empire is based on archival research and interviews--introducing a cast of characters as various as Senator Barry Goldwater and Cesar Romero--and is clarified by scenes imagined in the context of this evidence. Itis a singular and haunting story of American ambition and its tragic cost.
Of Zachary Lazar's previous book, Sway, the reviewer for The New York Times Book Review wrote, "This brilliant novel is about what's to be found in the shadows." The same can be said of Evening's Empire's true story, but here the shadows are very close to home.
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I Pity the Poor Immigrant: A Novel
This stunning novel by the author of Sway is another "brilliant portrayal of life as a legend" (Margot Livesey).
In 1972, the American gangster Meyer Lansky petitions the Israeli government for citizenship. His request is denied, and he is returned to the U.S. to stand trial. He leaves behind a mistress in Tel Aviv, a Holocaust survivor named Gila Konig.
In 2009, American journalist Hannah Groff travels to Israel to investigate the killing of an Israeli writer. She soon finds herself inside a web of violence that takes in the American and Israeli Mafias, the Biblical figure of King David, and the modern state of Israel. As she connects the dots between the murdered writer, Lansky, Gila, and her own father, Hannah becomes increasingly obsessed with the dark side of her heritage. Part crime story, part spiritual quest, I Pity the Poor Immigrant is also a novelistic consideration of Jewish identity.
Copies
No copies available.
I Pity the Poor Immigrant: A Novel
This stunning novel by the author of Sway is another "brilliant portrayal of life as a legend" (Margot Livesey).
In 1972, the American gangster Meyer Lansky petitions the Israeli government for citizenship. His request is denied, and he is returned to the U.S. to stand trial. He leaves behind a mistress in Tel Aviv, a Holocaust survivor named Gila Konig.
In 2009, American journalist Hannah Groff travels to Israel to investigate the killing of an Israeli writer. She soon finds herself inside a web of violence that takes in the American and Israeli Mafias, the Biblical figure of King David, and the modern state of Israel. As she connects the dots between the murdered writer, Lansky, Gila, and her own father, Hannah becomes increasingly obsessed with the dark side of her heritage. Part crime story, part spiritual quest, I Pity the Poor Immigrant is also a novelistic consideration of Jewish identity.
Copies
No copies available.
The Apartment on Calle Uruguay: A Novel
Longlisted for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize
A haunting new novel by the author of Vengeance in which a chance encounter between a blocked painter and a journalist leads to a complicated romance that reveals their buried histories and vulnerabilities against the backdrops of an America in chaos and Mexico.
Beginning in the first summer of the post-Obama world, Zachary Lazar's bewitching and masterful new novel tells the story of Christopher Bell, a blocked painter on the East End of Long Island, and Ana Ramirez, a journalist who fled the crisis in Venezuela and is looking for work in New York. Bell has always felt marked by his foreignness, having emigrated to the U.S. as a child, and has come to believe that "words like 'identity' and 'American' are somehow very meaningful and very meaningless at the same time.” He has retreated to a modest house near a patch of woods, “a rural nowhere…that sometimes held more meaning for me in its silence than human language.”
In the woods, he encounters Ana, who is trying to “reinvent herself as the kind of person she’d been before” the world she knew disappeared. A complicated romance develops that gradually reveals their buried histories—from the death of Bell’s former partner, Malika Jordan, a fellow artist, to the prison farm where he visits Malika’s incarcerated brother Jesse, to Mexico City, where Ana’s exiled family now lives. All of them have faced the same problem: how to build a new life once the idea you've had of "home" vanishes or becomes unrecognizable.
The Apartment on Calle Uruguay is a haunting exploration of love, art, and the cost of transformation. It lays out a fiercely intentional and introspective way of living in an unjust world.
Copies
No copies available.
The Apartment on Calle Uruguay: A Novel
A haunting new novel by the author of Vengeance in which a chance encounter between a blocked painter and a journalist leads to a complicated romance that reveals their buried histories and vulnerabilities against the backdrops of an America in chaos and Mexico.
Beginning in the first summer of the post-Obama world, Zachary Lazar's bewitching and masterful new novel tells the story of Christopher Bell, a blocked painter on the East End of Long Island, and Ana Ramirez, a journalist who fled the crisis in Venezuela and is looking for work in New York. Bell has always felt marked by his foreignness, having emigrated to the U.S. as a child, and has come to believe that "words like 'identity' and 'American' are somehow very meaningful and very meaningless at the same time.” He has retreated to a modest house near a patch of woods, “a rural nowhere…that sometimes held more meaning for me in its silence than human language.”
In the woods, he encounters Ana, who is trying to “reinvent herself as the kind of person she’d been before” the world she knew disappeared. A complicated romance develops that gradually reveals their buried histories—from the death of Bell’s former partner, Malika Jordan, a fellow artist, to the prison farm where he visits Malika’s incarcerated brother Jesse, to Mexico City, where Ana’s exiled family now lives. All of them have faced the same problem: how to build a new life once the idea you've had of "home" vanishes or becomes unrecognizable.
The Apartment on Calle Uruguay is a haunting exploration of love, art, and the cost of transformation. It lays out a fiercely intentional and introspective way of living in an unjust world.
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$16.95
Vengeance: A Novel
by Newt Gingrich, Pete Earley, Zachary Lazar
In this fast-paced political thriller, Major Brooke Grant joins the president's top-secret CIA team and races around the globe in pursuit of a terrorist known only as the Falcon.
On the day of Major Brooke Grant's wedding, an explosive-packed rental truck detonates a deadly bomb, killing hundreds of her friends and family and endangering D.C.'s most powerful politicians.
Saved by a last-minute fluke, Brooke seeks revenge against the master terrorist responsible, an international radical Islamist who is determined to murder her, bring America to its knees, and create a modern-day caliphate.
With help from an odd duo -- a Saudi intelligence officer and an Israeli Mossad agent -- Brooke goes after her elusive zealot nemesis. But before the team can close in on their target, they discover that America's worst nightmare has come true.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Pulitzer Prize finalist Pete Earley deliver fast-paced writing and a frighteningly believable plot in this third installment of the bestselling Brooke Grant series. Set against the backdrop of Washington's political intrigue, Vengeance is a heart-pounding thriller that raises serious questions about our national security, the power of religious faith to inspire good and evil, the consequences of revenge, and the validity of our constitutional safeguards.
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Vengeance: A Novel
by Newt Gingrich, Pete Earley, Zachary Lazar
“Tense and evocative . . . Despite its powerful social critique, Vengeance is cautious and prismatic, openly troubled by its own claims to authority.” —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
As someone who writes “fiction, nonfiction, sometimes a hybrid of both,” the narrator of Vengeance, a character much like Zachary Lazar himself, tries to accurately view a world he knows is “beyond the limits of my small understanding.” In particular, he is compelled to unravel the truth behind the supposed crime of an inmate he meets and befriends, Kendrick King, who is serving a life sentence at Angola for murder.
As the narrator attempts to sort out what happened in King’s life—paying visits to his devoted mother, his estranged young daughter and her mother, his girlfriend, his brother, and his cousin—the writer’s own sense of identity begins to feel more and more like a fiction. He is one of the “free people” while Kendrick, who studies theology and philosophy, will never get his only wish, expressed plainly as “I just need to get out of here.” The dichotomy between their lives forces the narrator to confront the violence in his own past, and also to reexamine American notions of guilt and penance, racial bias, and the inherent perversity of punitive justice.
Inspired by a passion play, The Life of Jesus Christ, he witnessed at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Vengeance, by way of vivid storytelling, helps us to understand the failure of empathy and imagination that perpetuates the incarceration crisis in our country.
“The state of Louisiana is the world’s incarceration capital, and Zachary Lazar is a world-class novelist, who brings humility and sensitivity" to this book (Rachel Kushner).
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