Michael Zadoorian
Author of The Leisure Seeker
About the Author
Michael Zadoorian was born & raised in Detroit, Michigan. His short fiction has appeared in many journals, including "The Literary Review" & "American Short Fiction". He lives with his wife in a bungalow filled with many strange old objects & a death-row cat. "Second Hand" is his first novel. show more (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Photo by John Roe
Works by Michael Zadoorian
Beat Girl 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Zadoorian, Michael
- Birthdate
- 20th Century
- Gender
- male
- Education
- public schools
Wayne State University (BA, MA) - Occupations
- freelance writer
copywriter - Awards and honors
- Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts
Columbia University Anahid Literary Award
Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award
Barnes & Noble Discover Selection
Michigan Notable Book award
Booksense 76 Selection - Agent
- Jud Laghi, LJK Literary Management
- Short biography
- Michael Zadoorian is the author of three novels, BEAUTIFUL MUSIC (To be published in May 2018 by Akashic Books), THE LEISURE SEEKER (William Morrow) and SECOND HAND (W.W. Norton), and a story collection, THE LOST TIKI PALACES OF DETROIT (Wayne State University Press). A motion picture of THE LEISURE SEEKER starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland will be released in March 2018.
Zadoorian is a recipient of a Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts, the Columbia University Anahid Literary Award, the Michigan Notable Book award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has appeared in The Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, American Short Fiction, Witness, Great Lakes Review, North American Review and the anthologies Bob Seger’s House, On The Clock, and Detroit Noir. He has worked as a copywriter, journalist, voice over talent, shipping room clerk, and a plant guard for Chrysler. A lifetime resident of the Detroit area, he lives with his wife in a 1937 bungalow filled with cats and objects that used to be in the houses of other people. - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Detroit, Michigan, USA
- Places of residence
- Ferndale, Michigan, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- Michigan, USA
Members
Discussions
Michael Zadoorian, author of The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit (May 18-29) in Author Chat (March 2018)
Reviews
This is a novel about aging, but one in which the elderly protagonists break out of the stereotypes. Ella and John are "Two down-on-their-luck geezers, one with more health problems than a third world country, the other so senile that he doesn't even know what day it is." Their children and doctors want John who has Alzheimers to be placed in a nursing home, and Ella who has terminal cancer to be hospitalized for further, probably futile, treatment. Against the advice of their doctors and show more children, Ella decides to take one final trip with her husband in their RV, the Leisure Seeker, a trip from their home in Michigan along fabled US Route 66 to Disneyland in California. The novel is narrated by Ella, whose acerbic wit makes the trip a pleasure for the reader, despite the various travails she and John undergo. The book is part travelogue exploring the decrepit ruins of the (mostly) abandoned Route 66, and part reflection on what meaning, in the end, we can take from our lives. Ella and John are very real people, and I enjoyed going along on their journey. show less
“Are we weird?” Ana asks Joe, her partner of a decade. After a few chapters of The Narcissism of Small Differences, I found myself emphatically shaking my head and saying, “Yes! You’re weird and I think that’s the image you’re going for.” Joe and Ana are approaching forty and have been together a decade. They pride themselves in not having married and also, not succumbing to the pressures to procreate. Living in a suburb of Detroit, Ana writes for an ad agency and supports Joe, show more who pens the occasional freelance article for alternative newspapers and spends the rest of his time at the Midlands Bar, talking to his friends about arcane bands and authors from their past. Basically, Joe and Ana are both tired and tiresome. Ana is tired of being the sole breadwinner and watching Joe, day after day, languish in front of his computer, doing who knows what (We find out what one day when she comes home unexpectedly and catches him in the act.). Joe is tired of living off of Ana and feeling underappreciated. Changes need to be made and they are. Read the book and you will find out just how far reaching. I found Joe and Ana a bit tiresome because as a twosome, they were uninteresting and predictable. As a flesh-and-blood couple I don’t think I would have liked them and I definitely didn’t care for them on the page. I simply couldn’t get interested in their life together or in how it would pan out. Comparing this Michael Zadoorian novel to his Beautiful Music, The Narcissism of Small Differences fell far short. I loved Beautiful Music. This book. Not so much. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: I think Author Zadoorian's Detroitophilia needed this book to come to a head...
Joe is an urban explorer, a man whose purpose in life is looking for something to look at; this isn't a tremendously profitable career, but he freelances as a local-music critic and spelunks the abandoned spaces of the city as his avocation. He has no mortgage and no kids, just a partner of over a decade, Ana. They're living an intentional life, but that ain't free. So Ana, his squeeze, makes the bills...in advertising, in a dead and dying city, that takes skill and luck which she abounds in.
And then, as it always will, Life happens. The two of them are wearing on each other. The thing about stasis is, no matter if it's tolerable or not, it has to end. Things in life are growing or dying:
There's nothing like the world for knocking your corners off...just sucks when the chunks go flying into those closest to you.
If Ana had wanted a sullen teenager, she would've had a kid...but here she is with a fractured man-child who resents her for winning their bread and whose friends are nasty pieces of White Male Privilege...Transphobia: one-half star off. N-word and repeated misogynistic bullshit use by white character: one-half star off. Yes, it's set in 2009...yes, it's not like these are people whose sophistication is meant to hold them up as examples. But this is ugliness and prejudice, and it doesn't get treated as such.
But the story is about more than that. It's about what it means to be You at last. These are forty-year-olds doing what the middle-aged literary characters of US while privilege are supposed to do: Reflecting on the emptiness of a life of getting and spending. And coming to terms with what they really, in fact, want from The System. Ana's decisions are less crowd-sourced...her one obvious friend isn't who she thought she was at exactly the wrong moment...than Joe's, but considering the caliber of his friends that's a good thing.
I found the story...exasperating. I found the dramatis personae...uncongenial. I found the ending...condign. show less
My Review: I think Author Zadoorian's Detroitophilia needed this book to come to a head...
It was a way for gray-flannel types to shed their inhibitions, go native, and get weird—uninhibited boozing, semierotic dancing to faux-exotic music, gaudy flowered shirts, sticky finger foods, unclad maiden flesh, and phallic tiki idols. At one point, Detroit had three Polynesian palaces, but when the city started bleeding honkies after the '67 raceshow more
riot, all of them eventually closed.
–and–
Should you be going to tiki parties in your forties? Was it possible to maintain ironic distance for that long, or should you have outgrown it by then? How long before you needed an irony supplement?
Joe is an urban explorer, a man whose purpose in life is looking for something to look at; this isn't a tremendously profitable career, but he freelances as a local-music critic and spelunks the abandoned spaces of the city as his avocation. He has no mortgage and no kids, just a partner of over a decade, Ana. They're living an intentional life, but that ain't free. So Ana, his squeeze, makes the bills...in advertising, in a dead and dying city, that takes skill and luck which she abounds in.
And then, as it always will, Life happens. The two of them are wearing on each other. The thing about stasis is, no matter if it's tolerable or not, it has to end. Things in life are growing or dying:
“Truth like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”
–and–
When is it going to end, this worshiping of ephemera? How long will our generation be obsessed with the past, with stuff that barely meant anything when it happened, that’s remembered only because it’s old or bad or weird or kooky?
There's nothing like the world for knocking your corners off...just sucks when the chunks go flying into those closest to you.
"You drop names and make references. You talk about songs, but rarely does a song speak to you. You laugh at cleverness because you recognize it's supposed to be funny, not because it is funny. You know about things for the sake of knowing about them, because you think you're supposed to, because you're afraid of being left out, not because they interest you. You're a dilettante, a potterer. You simply stopped trying to be anything more."
–and–
"It looks different through the lens, doesn't it?" {Joe's friend} said {to him}.
"I don't know why. It just makes more sense this way. It's easier to take in."
"Uh-huh. Sometimes what I'm looking at is too intense for me to understand without a filter, a way to view it. The camera helps." Brendan leveled his camera...and squeezed off a shot.
"Why is this so magnificent? What's wrong with us?"
"I told you...The verity of decay."
If Ana had wanted a sullen teenager, she would've had a kid...but here she is with a fractured man-child who resents her for winning their bread and whose friends are nasty pieces of White Male Privilege...Transphobia: one-half star off. N-word and repeated misogynistic bullshit use by white character: one-half star off. Yes, it's set in 2009...yes, it's not like these are people whose sophistication is meant to hold them up as examples. But this is ugliness and prejudice, and it doesn't get treated as such.
But the story is about more than that. It's about what it means to be You at last. These are forty-year-olds doing what the middle-aged literary characters of US while privilege are supposed to do: Reflecting on the emptiness of a life of getting and spending. And coming to terms with what they really, in fact, want from The System. Ana's decisions are less crowd-sourced...her one obvious friend isn't who she thought she was at exactly the wrong moment...than Joe's, but considering the caliber of his friends that's a good thing.
I found the story...exasperating. I found the dramatis personae...uncongenial. I found the ending...condign. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
I loved the voice of Ella in this book - matter-of-fact, content with herself, in charge. I loved the glimpses of the life Ella and John have made with each other - the moments when John remembers, when they are themselves together again. This is an unconventional road trip story, and I was torn between fear for the couple and sorrow for the difficulties that old age and sickness bring. Despite that, there are moments of real humor in the book, and I admired Ella so much for her strength.
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