
Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
A collection curated by me, Judith Carter, Executive Director MZS Press, LLC and business partner to MZS. I’m most proud of being a Single Mom to an Exceptional Son, a Legal Advocate and Special Education Advocate. I’ve been in the “Special Needs”/”Disability” community my entire life. For the record I’m not fond of these labels, or any label for that matter, but use the for general purposes, putting aside disability discourse.
Collection Creation
My son was born early, by medical intervention to save his life from serious complications. I was able to hold him for a moment and then the NICU team lovingly took him. Then, at 7 weeks old, he was hospitalized with his first documented seizures. I officially became a “special needs” mom when he was 17 months old, diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (Autism Spectrum Disorder). At 19 months he suffered a global regression, where he lost every developmental skill: walking, talking, eating, everything. There was more happening. This led to the discovery and diagnosis of a life-threatening variant of a very rare seizure disorder. Our journey had begun!
A voracious reader, I had always turned to books whether it was to learn, laugh, educate or escape. This time was no different. But every time I went to a bookstore to find these books the section was only a shelf, if the store had a section at all, and the majority of titles were academic and parenting advice books. Never once did I encounter a comprehensive selection. I had to rely on friends to point me in the right direction. This was how I learned how much there was out there, but there wasn’t a place—one place—to find many options.
Meanwhile, the arts were miraculously how I found the way to communicate with my son and give him the ability to communicate and express himself. Over time and with recommendations from our community, I found many amazing books. This collection has but a few!
About our Collection
In this collection/section, you’ll find Fiction & Non-Fiction, Memoirs, Biographies, Graphic Novels, Academic Texts, and much more. Titles strive to be inclusive of all people with disabilities: physical, visual, hearing, mental, medical and/or developmental; colors, demographics, and identities. Some are funny. Some are novels where the protagonist or main character has a disability of some kind. Some are academic books on disabilities in the Arts, inclusive of visual arts, music, performance arts, dance, film, television and literature. There is classic literature, and books on people that you may have never known or realized that have/had a disability.
Our Assurance
We are pricing all items at our cost without a profit. It’s more important to us to create/curate this collection and share it. So we're putting the margins very low, just enough to pay for creating and maintaining the collection and getting the information out there.
I've curated over 250 titles for the collection, so it will be like the rest of the store (and all of us), always changing and evolving. We’re starting the collection with 50 titles, 30 new titles and 20 that were already in our inventory.
I’m in search of the best spoken word books on the Arts to be added to the collection and to the store in general.
If you have any recommendations on books that would be a great fit for this collection, please email me at mzspress@gmail.com, I would love to hear from you. The more we share, the more we know and the more we know the more we grow.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store's inventory of nearly 1000 volumes is currently in the process of being reconstructed after its relocation from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz, Carter, and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
“Please. Have mercy. I’ve been wearing the same underwear since Tuesday.”
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; a staff writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and the forthcoming The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. He is currently working on a memoir about his marriages and a feature-length documentary about his father, jazz musician and composer Dave Zoller.
His hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. He has the attention span of a gnat.