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
The Wes Letters is an epistolary novel written from three friends to the elusive Wes Anderson. The story begins on a train and multiplies, composes, and fragments itself across the United States to Finland. A collaborative work of fiction by Feliz Lucia Molina, Ben Segal and Brett Zehner, it's about personal memory, it's about gossip and philosophy, and it's about pop culture and late capitalism. It's (not) about Wes Anderson. It's a generational vacuum full of hope and embarrassment.
"Writing into the sand hole that is 'Wes Anderson,' three friends write their way almost to the limit of their engagingly ambivalent and indisputably brilliant personalities, thereby calling into question the certainty of anything. Follow their quest to the Fin/n/ish line! A gripping read." - Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
"THE WES LETTERS seems destined to find its place among other recent classics of the epistolary novel narrated by smart, anxious, and questing narrators. . . but its triangular structure is all its own, as are its particular obsessions: transference, celebrity, friendship, changing technologies of writing, and the various relations - be they pained, productive, or pleasurable - between performativity and 'something like honesty,' if not honesty itself." - Maggie Nelson
"Dear Wes Anderson - Each film you make is a secret letter to the viewer, and each letter in THE WES LETTERS is a secret view into you. These letters are innovations of you, the authors' lives chronicled through apostrophe, radiant stylistic gymnastics, philosophies in flight - these letters are relentless and resplendent. You won't regret reading this book, Wes Anderson, it's hardly about you at all." - xo Lily Hoang
iz Lucia Molina is the author of Undercastle and the forthcoming collaborative book The Middle. She studied at Naropa University, Brown University, and European Graduate School. Her writing can be found in various journals and magazines. She is based in Los Angeles and can be found at stripmallheaven.tumblr.com.
Note: This is a limited edition, small-press book, signed by all three authors (Molina, Segal and Zehner).
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.