Zachary Lazar ’90 is the author of six books, including Sway, Evening’s Empire, Vengeance, I Pity the Poor Immigrant, and The Apartment on Calle Uruguay. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Lazar serves on the advisory board of the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship and the selection committee for the National Book Foundation’s Literature for Justice program. He is on the creative writing faculty at Tulane University.

The Apartment on Calle Uruguay

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, 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."

Sway

Witness the early days of the Rolling Stones, including the romantic triangle of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and Keith Richards; the life of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the community of Charles Manson and his followers. Lazar illuminates an hour in American history when rapture found its roots in idolatrous figures and led to unprovoked and inexplicable violence.

Connecting all the stories in this novel is Bobby Beausoleil, a beautiful California boy who appeared in an Anger film and eventually joined the Manson “family.”