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
New York Times bestseller Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics is a landmark celebration of the remarkable life and career of a country music and pop culture legend.
As told in her own inimitable words, Songteller explores the songs that have defined Parton's journey. Illustrated throughout with previously unpublished images from her personal and business archives, the Washington Post calls it "a gold mine of little-seen photos and personal anecdotes."
Mining over 60 years of songwriting, Dolly Parton highlights 175 of her songs and brings readers behind the lyrics. A celebrity memoir like no other, Dolly Parton, Songteller reveals the stories and memories that have made Dolly a beloved icon across generations, genders, and social and international boundaries.
A RARE VISUAL ARCHIVE: Packed with never-before-seen photographs and classic memorabilia from Parton's archives, this book is a show-stopping must-have for every Dolly Parton fan.
BEHIND THE BELOVED SONGS: Learn the history, personal stories, candid insights, and myriad memories behind classic Parton songs like "Jolene," "9 to 5," "I Will Always Love You," and more in this "splashy, entertaining guide to the lyrics of one of the most popular musicians of our time" (Kirkus Reviews).
CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED: First published in hardcover with resounding response from fans and media alike, including showstopping interviews with Oprah, Stephen Colbert, Brené Brown, and The Today Show, features in People, Parade, Marie Claire, USA Today, Washington Post, and much more.
EVERYONE LOVES DOLLY: The perfect gift for Dolly Parton fans, as well as lovers of music history and country singer-songwriters.
Perfect for:
Robert K. Oermann is a Nashville-based music journalist who is considered the "unofficial historian of Nashville's musical heritage." He has written several books on country music, including Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music, which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music book excellence. He lives with his wife in Nashville, Tennessee.
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."
"I feel comfortable using legal jargon in everyday life... I object!" Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz in Legally Blonde, 2001
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as 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 such as Texas Highways and AARP. 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 bestsellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and 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 has launched a Dallas extension of his MZS Film Series at the historic Texas Theater. On October 3-6, 2024 he brought the legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone back to Dallas for a historic return to the city and the Texas Theatre!
Judith is quoted as saying "his hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. Oh and he has the attention span of a gnat." MZS agreed to it all except the moonwalking.