Newsstand: Cream of the Zines

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The range of material in these books is impressive: covering everything from an interview in Stay Free! with a supermarket Pillsbury doughboy (who dissed the Keebler elves this way: 'They're a little small and they get underfoot') to a phone sex gal's memoir in Snevil ('You had to say you were tall and blond--no black girls, no Spanish girls') to an account of Boston's Great Molasses Flood of 1919 in Murder Can Be Fun ('It took a week just to recover the bodies of the 21 victims'). Sex, pop culture, and perverse turns of the zeitgeist are favorite topics. Both first-person accounts and well-researched chronicles are presented with an admirable degree of historical and social context. The writing is mostly quite good, full of laughs and rebellious sass.

Zines reflect the fierce individualism always afoot in American culture--in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau, the ACLU, and the Merry Pranksters as well as that of Ayn Rand, the Libertarian Party, and Bill Gates. The Book of Zines and The Factsheet Five Reader, and the tidal wave of titles from which they are drawn, don't point us in any particular direction for a more promising future. There's little in these books about spirituality or politics, and no expressed belief that collective action offers hope of improving anyone's lot in life. But they do give us a vivid, truthful sense of where our society stands right now--and that's important.

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