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.

Suburban World: The Norling Photos

Arts & Photography

Zellar, Brad

Individual Artists

Borealis Books

The social and political forces that swirled through the turbulent 1960s crested in 1968. That year saw the peak of the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, riots at the Democratic National Convention, assertions of Black power at the Olympic Games, and feminist demonstrations at the Miss America Pageant. Hair opened on Broadway, Laugh-In debuted on TV, and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey polarized critics. President Lyndon Johnson chose not seek reelection following a tumultuous five years in office, and his successor, Richard Nixon, promised in his nomination acceptance speech that "the long, dark night for America is about to end." In the closing days of the year, we saw earth in its entirety for the first time from the window of the Apollo 8 space capsule. The 1968 Project is the accompanying book to the 1968 exhibit, a major traveling exhibition developed by the Minnesota Historical Society in partnership with the Atlanta History Center, the Chicago History Museum, and the Oakland Museum of California. This companion book integrates personal experiences within the national context of the year, organized month by month, through photography, eyewitness accounts, artifacts, and illuminating commentary by one of the Twin Cities' top social and cultural writers, Brad Zellar.

The 1968 Project: A Nation Coming of Age

History

Americas

Minnesota Historical Society Press

From roller rinks and record players to coin-operated condom dispensers and small-town mobsters, Till the Wheels Fall Off is a novel about an unconventional childhood among the pleasures and privations of the pre-digital era. It's the late 1980s, and Matthew Carnap is awake most nights, afflicted by a potent combination of insomnia and undiagnosed ADHD. Sometimes he gazes out his bedroom window into the dark; sometimes he wanders the streets of his small southern Minnesota town. But more often than not, he crosses the hall into his stepfather Russ's roller rink to spend the sleepless hours lost in music. Russ's record collection is as eclectic as it is extensive, and he and Matthew bond over discovering new tunes and spinning perfect skate mixes. Then Matthew's mother divorces Russ; they move; the roller rink closes; the twenty-first century arrives. Years later, an isolated, restless Matthew moves back to his hometown. From an unusual apartment in the pressbox of the high school football stadium, he searches his memories, looking for something that might reconnect him with Russ. With humor and empathy, Brad Zellar (House of Coates) returns with a discursive, lo-fi novel about rural Midwestern life, nostalgia, neurodiversity, masculinity, and family.

Till the Wheels Fall Off

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Blackstone Pub

"An exquisitely haunting, melancholic treasure of a book about people who drop out and populate tiny towns and rural communities, and the longing and loneliness of the human condition."—Judy Natal, Photo-Eye "One of the great American moves is vagrancy, the freedom to drift, the right to look at things from outside the mainstream. The prose in House of Coates hums with this irreducible freedom. The photographs are both perfectly artless and undeniably visionary. Any question of fiction, non-fiction, subterfuge, or narrative trickery is superfluous in a book like this one, so appealingly strange, so delicately balanced, and so incontestably bound to its time and place."—Teju Cole, author of Open City "A very handsome paperback edition...a new afterword wraps the whole mystery of Lester beautifully." —MinnPost "As Brad Zellar so vividly illustrates in his new limited-edition collaboration with photographer Alec Soth, 'House Of Coates,' broken men have always been with us, haunting us, providing a mirror. Society may label them bums, homeless, or pariahs, but Zellar's empathetic writing allows the reader to get inside one broken man, and therefore all."—Jim Walsh, MinnPost Washed up in the shadow of a refinery, Lester B. Morrison, legendary recluse, documents his life in a series of photographs taken with a disposable camera. In a landscape of off ramps, warehouses, and SRO hotels occupied by terminally lonely men, love and faith break in, quietly offering human connection and the possibility of redemption. Brad Zellar has worked as a writer and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, as well as for both regional and national magazines. He is the author of Suburban World: The Norling Photos, The 1968 Project, Conductors of the Moving World, and House of Coates. Alec Soth is a photographer whose first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004. Since then Soth has published over a dozen books including Niagara (2006), Dog Days, Bogotá (2007), The Last Days of W (2008), and Broken Manual (2010). Soth's work has been exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland.

House of Coates

Photography & Video

Coffee House Press

From roller rinks and record players to coin-operated condom dispensers and small-town mobsters, Till the Wheels Fall Off is a novel about an unconventional childhood among the pleasures and privations of the pre-digital era. 
It’s the late 1980s, and Matthew Carnap is awake most nights, afflicted by a potent combination of insomnia and undiagnosed ADHD. Sometimes he gazes out his bedroom window into the dark; sometimes he wanders the streets of his small southern Minnesota town. But more often than not, he crosses the hall into his stepfather Russ’s roller rink to spend the sleepless hours lost in music. Russ’s record collection is as eclectic as it is extensive, and he and Matthew bond over discovering new tunes and spinning perfect skate mixes. Then Matthew’s mother divorces Russ; they move; the roller rink closes; the twenty-first century arrives. Years later, an isolated, restless Matthew moves back to his hometown. From an unusual apartment in the pressbox of the high school football stadium, he searches his memories, looking for something that might reconnect him with Russ. 
With humor and empathy, Brad Zellar (House of Coates) returns with a discursive, lo-fi novel about rural Midwestern life, nostalgia, neurodiversity, masculinity, and family―with a built-in soundtrack.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Zellar, Brad. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Zellar, Brad

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Zellar, Brad. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Suburban World: The Norling Photos

The 1968 Project: A Nation Coming of Age

Till the Wheels Fall Off

House of Coates

Till the Wheels Fall Off