Zito Madu launches "The Minotaur at Calle Lanza," with Shamira Ibrahim

Local author Zito Madu will be joined for a conversation, reading, reception, and book signing with culture writer Shamira Ibrahim.

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Venice, 2020. As a pandemic rages across the globe, Zito Madu finds himself in a nearly deserted city, its walls and basilicas humming with strange magic. As he wanders a haunted landscape, we see him twist further into his own past: his family’s difficult immigration from Nigeria to Detroit, his troubled relationship with his father, the sporadic joys of daily life and solitude, his experiences with migration, poverty, foreignness, racism, and his own rage and regret. But as it is with all labyrinths, after finding its center, will he come away unscathed, or will he transform into the gripping, fantastical monstrousness that’s out to consume him whole?

With nods to Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, this surrealist debut memoir takes us into the labyrinth of memory and the monsters lurking there.

"Difficult to categorize but hauntingly effective. It has no fail-safe audience but will reward whoever picks it up." —David Keymer, Library Journal (STARRED REVIEW)

"From a small village in Nigeria, to the bustling streets of Venice, via the city of Detroit, Zito Madu’s The Minotaur at Calle Lanza is an engaging, even surreal, autobiographical account of travel and the spectacle and fear of the Other. A brilliant debut." —Ben Carrington

“The Minotaur at Calle Lanza is stunningly paradoxical. The deeper you wander into the so-called monster’s labyrinth, the clearer and more affecting his entrapment becomes. With this debut, Madu masterfully entangles the quietude of the pandemic travelogue with the diasporic memoir without cliché, whose contents are equally candid in their curious introspection and romantic in their sensitivity and pictorial prose.” —Zoe Samudzi

"This book is mesmerizing. Embedding intimate memories of family and childhood amidst travels through Venice, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza is a transfixing meditation on violence, migration, and the terror of transformation. Subtle and penetrating, exquisitely written and deeply imaginative, this book will endure as a timeless story of one man’s odyssey." —Michelle Kuo

Zito Madu is a Nigerian-born writer who grew up in Detroit, Michigan. A former narrative director at several creative agencies, sportswriter, soccer player, and engineering student, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. His writing has been published in many publications, including Plough Quarterly, Victory Journal, GQ Magazine, the New Republic, and the Nation.

Shamira Ibrahim is a Brooklyn-based culture writer by way of Harlem, Canada, and East Africa, who explores identity, cultural production and technology as a critic, reporter, feature/profile writer, and essayist. Her work has been featured in publications such as New York Magazine, Essence, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, BuzzFeed, Vox, OkayAfrica, The Baffler and Harper’s Bazaar. She is currently the Francophone regional editor at Africa is A Country, amplifying stories on the cultural, social, and political reality within Françafrique and the greater Francophonie.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Lofty Pigeon Books, Church Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA, United States