From Kirkus Reviews

"[Zevy's] debut short story collection offers whimsical, mostly true tales of his life..."

But this book, consisting of 34 tales, isn't exclusively autobiographical. A man named Harold Goldfarb headlines a series of hysterical stories...
Zevy writes in an easy-going style which is both polished and seemingly improvised...
Complementing the author's humor is earnestness, particularly when writing about his charming parents...
Heartfelt and droll tales which blend autobiography and fiction.

From Midwest Book Review:

"It's entertaining, it's funny, it's culturally revealing, and it's steeped in the unexpected."

Almost the Truth: Stories and Lies is uniformly one of the more creative, satisfyingly reads of 2020. Readers who enjoy wry humor and life observations that depart from any anticipated pathway will delight in Aaron Zevy's collection, which is often politically or culturally incorrect in delightful ways.

Starred Review from Blue Ink Review

"With the ease of a practiced storyteller and an outrageously droll sense of humor, Aaron Zevy ("Ronnie" to his friends and family), presents an anthology of rollicking personal essays and fictional short stories in his latest offering..."

"Zevy's self-deprecating humor makes him an irresistible character. His easy-going prose and fast-paced, sitcom-style conversations create laugh-out-loud and sometimes poignant mo-ments. While those un-familiar with contemp-orary Jewish customs and religious traditions may miss the subtler culturally related humor, Zevy's facile comic ability will appeal to anyone willing to find humor in the human condition."

From Midwest Book Review:

"...A winning set of amusing, fun, thought-provoking reads..."

"Each story contains an underlying lesson about life. Most of all, they teach a form of humor and observation which keeps readers engaged, laughing, and considering the slings and arrows of life and one's reaction to it."

"'Bubbe Meise' is defined as a 'An Old Wives Tale'. An untrue story. It's also the heart and soup of Zevy's fun tales, which are highly recommended for readers looking for humor and something eloquently different."

From Publisher’s Weekly BookLife

"Wry, self-deprecating humor is the highlight of this delightful collection of drawn-from-life short fictions, the third from Canadian Zevy (The Bubbe Meise and Other Stories). With prose and a warm, incisive comic spirit reminiscent of the likes of Arthur Bradford or Ruskin Bond, Zevy's vivid vignettes find inspiration in people the author meets during the course of his days, everyday activities like going for a walk or meeting friends for a meal, or discussing rejection slips at Starbucks. But behind these quotidian happenings and their hilarious descriptions, these stories also gently illuminate human foibles and follies.

From Kirkus Reviews

A collection offers short stories that blend truth and fiction.

In a prefatory note, Zevy warns readers of his tendency toward literary embellishment, the untidy merger of remembrance and invention, resulting in tales “of both imagination and lived experiences mixed together to delight and entertain.” Sometimes, a flight of fancy is obvious—for example, in two stories the Angel of Death is a principal character, described in a gamesomely comic manner that typifies the author’s style throughout this volume: “He has the requisite goatee and a cowlick which looks like it is held down by gel. He is wearing khakis and a button-down shirt. If I didn’t know he was the Angel of Death I would have guessed he was an assistant manager at Whole Foods.” When the Angel of Death unexpectedly shows up for dinner and allows the narrator to resurrect someone, the man randomly blurts out the name of Italo Svevo, the Italian novelist. Zevy’s signature devices are the hazy amalgamation of fact and fantasy and the disruption of the quotidian by the jocosely absurd. The author discusses bird-watching, the life of a germaphobe before the pandemic, stamp collecting, and food—he’s at his best proving that the extraordinary exists within the ordinary. Readers will be drawn into these largely brief vignettes, and the line of demarcation between the real and the imagined will cease to matter. In fact, the audience will learn to embrace the messy mixture.

From Blue Ink Reviews

"Author Aaron Zevy is back with another boisterous collection of short stories guaranteed to delight and entertain.

Zevy and his zany collection of friends and relatives from previous books return to act as the author's foils in his predicaments and self-deprecating stories. The author deftly conjures tall tales, perhaps based on reality — or not. The laugh-out-loud quality of his work makes fact or fiction irrelevant."

From California Bookwatch

"Not Book Club Material is a memoir packed with wry humor, mouth-watering revelations, and insights that are candid, thought-provoking, and fun all in one. The introduction to this collection captures all these facets in a few succinct lines: "Before my first collection came out, I toyed with the notion of adding a recipe section in the middle of the book because many of the stories were about the Egyptian Jewish food I was raised on. Books, especially self-published story collections by completely unknown former powder paint salesmen are, as it turns out, surprisingly hard to market and I thought the recipes might be a compelling hook. One July morning, over a breakfast of scrambled eggs at the cottage, I made the mistake of casually suggesting it might be of interest for book clubs. I actually thought it was a pretty good idea. This led my sister-in-law to utter the sentence which became the family's favorite line in the summer of 2020. "Your book," she said in her completely honest and unfiltered style, "is not book club material."

Thus, the title was born...and a rollicking ride through a life that introduces (and quickly answers) the question of what makes a good book club read and that book clubs…

Above all, enjoy vivid, thought-provoking material. Ironically, Not Book Club Material's stories represent these very things, and it would be a shame if book clubs judged the title by the size of its tales. Here lies bright, sparkling jewels of insight and experience in fun mix of reality and fantasy that features a host of characters and dilemmas and more than light references to food.

The delightful family stories usually conclude with ironic twists. Each stand-alone piece adds to the strength of the collection as a whole, providing enticing tidbits of facts and whimsy to delight the heart and mind like sugar on the tongue.

Perhaps now, more than ever, there is an exceptional need for the laughter, fun, and family reflections of the stories in Not Book Club Material. And these facets make for, ironically, perfect book club material indeed as readers navigate the Jewish culture, Egyptian heritage, and observations of food, love, and learning that permeate this collection.

Jewish, literary, and general-interest humor and memoir readers who delight stories of in food and family will all find Not Book Club Material a major attraction. And, yes, book clubs interested in any of these subjects should put it high on their reading lists."

From Publisher's Weekly

Powered by love and written with the can-you-top-this? punchiness of a born dinner-time storyteller, this charming, conversational, and often uproarious collection from Zevy (author of Almost the Truth: Stories and Lies) about his family and upbringing often turns on surprising bits of language. Like thousands of Jews, his parents, an Ashkenazi father and Sephardic mother, were forced out of Egypt in 1956; raising a family in suburban Montreal, they spoke French in the house and spiced the conversation with lively Arabic words and phrases. These include one that—in Zevy’s telling—means something like “leave me alone” but literally translates as “enema.” More telling is a phrase meaning “the story is wearing a bedsheet,” used to say there’s more to a tale than might be readily apparent.

Zevy pares these memories to the bone, their telling here as crisp as well-honed stand-up routines. But all their punchlines and incisive character portraiture they’re also swaddled in bedsheets. Reading these stories—of drinking games at family seders, of trying to land a big client for the family business, of introducing a complex Chinese poker variant to octogenarian Egyptian Jews, of the mystery of snapshots of topless women on a beach in a family photo album—is both a pleasure and an immersion, as close an invitation to imagine this family’s most joyous moments of sharing and laughter.

Some stories Zevy says he’s telling for the first time. Others feel like the best kind of family ritual, with Zevy even acknowledging what details got invented to score bigger laughs in the re-telling. He even carps that the thunder of one doozy, about a blind date, has been stolen, a little, by its vague similarity to a Seinfeld premise. That just makes it funnier, as does his occasional twists, like the marvelous swindle he pulls to make readers think the one about driving a tractor on a kibbutz is going to be sexy.

Takeaway: Hilarious, touching stories of an Egyptian Jewish family’s life in North America.

From Krikus Reviews

Zevy offers episodic reminiscences of his life and family history in this memoir.

The stories with which the author begins this volume look back to his family’s history of membership in the huge Jewish community that existed in Egypt before the 1956 Suez Crisis, which precipitated the emigration of his mother, father, aunts, and uncles to Montreal, Canada. The stories his relatives tell about these years have a resigned quality: “If anything, they all remembered their life in Egypt as halcyon days,” Zevy writes. “It had been a place which was good for the Jews. And then it wasn’t.” From this beginning, the narrative expands in many directions, most of which reflect on some aspect of the author’s Jewishness. Recalling an encounter with a Galilean rabbi, for instance, Zevy writes, “I eat bread on Passover, I do not fast on Yom Kippur, I drive a car and light a fire on shabbat,” adding puckishly, “and I have, more than once, coveted my neighbor’s wife.” There are more generalized stories balancing these Judaism-themed chapters; “I Shall Be Released,” for example, is the story of the Angel of Death visiting the narrator and needing to use the bathroom (“He has the requisite goatee and a cowlick which looks like it is held down by gel. He is wearing khakis and a button-down shirt. If I didn’t know he was the Angel of Death I would have guessed he was an assistant manager at Whole Foods”); the two end up playing chess and talking about music. In “Looking for Maurice,” the author is inspired by the appearance of a picture by the French painter Maurice Utrillo in the background of a family photo to talk about the artist and reflect on the painting.

This kind of mish-mash of autobiographical whimsy and nostalgia is usually as tedious as listening to someone narrate a large family album, but Zevy spares his readers this discomfort. He mainly does so through zestful storytelling and a persistent wry humor that almost always lands (in the story “Straight Sets,” for instance, he writes of his father, “If you closed your eyes, you would think you were listening to the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat,” adding: “If Sadat was the owner of a powder coating company and not the President of Egypt”). The author creates the feeling of a warm story-session in the living room of a funny, charismatic friend skilled at keeping his audience engaged. At almost every point, he’s ready with a sharp observation or a punchy zinger, as in the story “Shesh Besh,” which recounts the narrator’s blind dinner date with an online match (TorontoCityGirl44): “She does not fake-reach for her purse when the bill arrives,” Zevy writes. “Which, to be honest, I appreciate.” Some will enjoy the droll “kids-these-days” notes that the author occasionally strikes (deadpan observations about emojis and the like). Throughout the book, the narrative momentum is sustained—readers will seldom be tempted to stop turning the pages.

A consistently engaging collection of family stories and personal anecdotes.

From Blue Ink Reviews

Prolific humorist Aaron Zevy returns with his latest collection of tales— a mix of truth and imagination—in Schlepping Across the Nile. Many stories are selected from his previous books.

Zevy’s father, an Ashkenazi Jew (of central European descent), and his mother, a Sephardic Jew (of Spanish/Portuguese descent) were once part of an 80,000 strong Jewish-Egyptian community. They were expelled from Egypt after the 1956 Suez Crisis—the “second exodus,” writes Zevy. Immigrating to Canada, “We were the other Jews,” he jests.

Zevy’s preference for Sephardic customs and food provide fodder for some of his humor. His constant complaining about Ashkenazi food at a Passover Seder becomes the cue for a drinking game among the younger participants.

French, Arabic, English, and Hebrew are used interchangeably in most family dialogue. This polyglot of languages results in farcical misunderstandings. Family reminiscing about a favorite bakery, Home Made Cake, becomes “Om Met Kek” in Zevy’s mind. Upon discovering the name was English, not Arabic, the author becomes the butt of many family jokes.

A poignant entry reminiscing about his recently deceased mother highlights Zevy’s versatility. “Because that is my mother.” “And I will miss her,” he writes with heartfelt emotion.

Zevy’s Seinfeld-esque, self-deprecating humor makes him instantly relatable and charming. The author’s trademark staccato sentences, profanities and punchlines are also used to great effect. For example: “I tell people that the ‘schlepping’ in the title is a nod to my father’s Ashkenaz side. But that’s not really true. I never heard him say it. I just think it’s a funny word.”

Zevy is masterful with his craft, and readers of any stripe will find droll humor within these pages.

From Publisher's Weekly

This impeccably photographed and imminently enjoyable collection of stories finds Zevy, the storyteller behind Schlepping Across the Nile, recounting the joy of hunting and preserving vintage radios, from a 1938 Emerson Bullseye with its “unmistakable and stunning Sakhnoffsky design” to a 1975 Spider-Man transistor radio ordered off Ebay to dazzle a grandnephew. As in Zevy’s other amusing collections of not-quite-nonfiction stories, Radio Daze is penned in a polished, wisecracking, conversational style that wastes few words, this time offering insight into the role radios play in his personal life and our collective history while also exploring a resonant question: What lengths would you go to add the perfect piece to the collection you treasure but that others may find a little weird?

Zevy would go pretty far. His friends Allie, Lewberg, and Goldfarb try their best to reel him in, but for the most part, they have failed. Zevy has endured cranky neighbors, the film industry, and an unpredictable NFT market, to add to his impressive collection, documented here in striking photos. The vibrant colors of radios from the art deco and space-age eras are in compelling harmony with the designs. But his “descent” doesn’t come at the cost of his decency. Touchingly, when he scores his top-of-the-list dream find, a 1946 Cyarts manufactured with Plexon and Lucite, for a surprisingly good price at a Miami pawn shop, he posts a cautious note online inviting anyone who’s had such a radio stolen to contact him.

As always, Zevy makes no claim to the factual veracity of these tales, which build to wry twists, sharp jokes, and incisive, even prankish surprises—in fact, the one about the Spider-Man transistor radio ends with family members telling him it would work better if he made it less true. For all the radio history, here, Zevy’s real subiect is collecting itself; let radios stand in for any of our passions, pursued and collected over the years, and Radio Daze will often show ourselves.

Takeaway: Funny, surprising stories of a collector’s passion for gorgeous vintage radios.

From BookWatch Reviews

Zevy presents a collection of stories about collecting old radios in this memoir.

“Radio Daze: A Descent Into Collecting pairs lovely color photos of Aaron Zevy's personal antique radio collection with a chronicle of how he became enamored of radios from the 1930s and 40s. He built his attraction and historical knowledge from the unexpected development of a writer's block which led him to turn his attention to collecting for respite and rejuvenation.

Most book introductions provide staid background information, but Zevy's colorful way of capturing his passion brings its origins to life in a manner that portends an equally colorful series of stories:

"Someone even had the temerity to use the line "if these radios could talk, oh what stories they could tell." I threw that person out of my house. Let the radios be, I pleaded. Let them sit on their shelves, and let them sing their songs of unbearable static. They were not literary devices. They were not writing exercises. They were just old radios. And then, as you may have guessed, I wrote a story. And then another. And then this book."

'The Radio Contest' opens the collection with a memoir of Zevy's youth and entering a radio station contest that promised coveted concert tickets as a prize. There was only one special challenge to winning-a father's strict rule about dinner time and phone calls.

Readers won't expect the diversity of stories which chronicle lives, bygone years, and early dating scenarios in which radio collections were not to be mentioned.

The lively intersection of memoir and radio history represents a rare conjoined history of fate and snafus involved in growing a collection, an interest, and a mindset. The reflections on particular pieces that proved a collecting challenge or the backgrounds and appearances that made these radios a major attraction to Zevy form the foundations of a series of interlinked stories that will attract and educate even readers who held little prior interest in radio history or collecting.

A good collection of stories will reach beyond its intended audience to surprise, delight, and entertain the masses.

Radio Daze: A Descent Into Collecting's ability to reach beyond radio's signals and into the lives of any reader who has cultivated a passion for collecting, art, or history makes it a top recommendation for general-interest lending libraries as well as specialty media collections. Book clubs interested in an uncommon, exceptionally lively blend of memoir and collector's passion will find Radio Daze: A Descent Into Collecting will provoke all manner of connection and lively discussion.

From Kirkus Reviews

Zevy presents a collection of stories about collecting old radios in this memoir.

“Radios are my thing,” writes the author in what certainly must be the understatement of the year. His book tells the story of this overwhelming collector’s urge: He fell under the spell of vintage radios early in life, came to know them very well, and started collecting them. Several of the radios are presented in these pages as the linchpins of stories relating moments from both Zevy’s adventures as collector and from his life with his friends and family. Inevitably, some of the stories feature high degrees of nerdy punctilio (the author notices, at one point, that a set in the movie Goodfellas features a 1956 Motorola radio in a scene that takes place in 1978), but Zevy regularly counterbalances this element with everyman observations about everything from dealing with delivery services to negotiating with sketchy dealers. He likewise softens the ultra-niche nature of his own specific interest by painting an effective portrait of what it’s like to be a dedicated collector—not just of vintage radios, but of anything. Readers are shown every aspect of the life of a collector, from the “honeymoon phase” (that was “affecting a judgment which was already teetering on the edge of sanity”) to the resigned and world-weary later stages of accepting that virtually nobody else will understand the obsession. To help give readers context for his avocation, the author includes clear color photos of all of his focal-point radios.

The author begins the chapter titled “1947 Northern Electric Baby Champ,” for instance, by recounting a drive from Montreal to Toronto in 1977 to start his first year in university. Of course, he’s aware of the limited appeal of his subject; he mentions it several times. “For a while, every time I received a new radio, I would take a photograph and post it on our family group chat,” he writes; most of his family would just ignore him. This wry self-deprecation buoys the narrative and saves it from being a pure exercise in the tedium of inflicting a family album on a stranger. And he’s consistently funny when describing the various astonished reactions his collection elicits from normal people. In the chapter titled “1954 Sparton Football,” for instance, he reports that the most common question he gets is whether or not all those old radios actually work. “It is a bit of a tricky question because, although the great majority do work, they don’t get very good, or actually any, reception where I live,” he writes. “So, I end up giving Bill Clinton-like answers – ‘it depends on your definition of works.’ ” The cumulative effect of these quips and relatable storytelling ultimately saves the book from being for fellow collectors only.

A surprisingly engaging look at the life of an avid collector.

From Blue Ink Reviews

Humorist Aaron Zevy’s latest book, Radio Daze, offers short stories, each relating to a vintage radio from his prized collection.

“Collecting and addiction are separate words, but I’m not entirely sure they are all that different,” quips Zevy in this new work. His extensive vintage (1938-1974) radios line the walls of almost every room in his home. Chapters begin with a photograph from the collection: each a work of art evoking a bygone era. As is his way, Zevy blends fact and fiction, resulting in comical, offbeat stories.

Entries include a golfing rabbi with a wicked slice; a “prehistoric reptile about 18 inches long” (evasively loose in the house); a mangled radio from war-torn Ukraine, and a reprise visit from the Angel of Death. In one memorable story, Zevy discovered that a radio in his collection was likely a looted Nazi radio. He flew to New York to participate in a ceremony returning items to the owners’ ancestors. He eventually replaced it, quipping, “I’m pretty sure it [the replacement] hadn’t been stolen. But I didn’t display it just in case.”

Readers familiar with Zevy’s writing will welcome the return of his wingmen, the Ketel and Cran drinking Goldfarb and the sometimes-dour Lewberg, amusing foils in many stories.

Zevy uses his trademark staccato style, and each story ends with a one-line zinger, usually eliciting a smile or a chuckle."

"Aaron Zevy is a Canadian Comedy writer who happened to go down the path of collecting (and to some degree obsessing) over good old fashioned table radios and pocket portables. Since I have quite a few five tube classics in my collection, this book caught my eye when it showed up as an ad on my Facebook feed. I reached out to Aaron and he was happy to get a copy of his book to me for a nice Beach Read. When was the last time you read a book related to the radio hobby that was laugh out loud funny? For those of us initiated into the deeper depths of the radio world, you will even get more enjoyment from the reading than maybe the folks the book was originally intended for. Zevy's book is a series of personal anecdotes, each of which surrounds the acquisition of one radio or another. The radio for each story includes a picture that, as a collector myself, often leaves me drooling. For example, his somewhat well used 1960 Zenith Royal 50 harkens back to my own Silvertone 6 Transistor my Grandfather gave me for my 6^th Birthday. (I still have it)"

From BookWatch Reviews

Retro Radio Rainbow teaches picture book readers the seven colors of the rainbow, but adopts an usual approach to the effort that taps author Aaron Zevy's personal radio collection and interest in radios.

What do radios have to do with color? Plenty.

Photos of old-time radios from the 1930s and 40s accompany the identification of 'red', 'orange', and other colors to add history into the mix. This especially inviting pairing features large, colorful photos of orange, red, yellow, and other colors of radios that additionally contrasts their size and disparate shapes and appearances.

The education thus arrives twofold: it's a survey of radio history and a lesson in different hues of each color, all in one.

Parents and educators who tire of the usual approach to identifying colors will find the creative effort attractive and unique, here. The retro radio display might even interest and educate them about the very different appearances radios can sport.

Libraries and teachers seeking a colorful tutorial that operates on not just one, but many levels will welcome the unique approach of Retro Radio Rainbow, which could only have come from a collector devoted to radio history as well as children's educational opportunities.

From Kirkus Reviews

Vintage commercial design meets early literacy in Zevy’s colorful picture book.

"Radios were once so common, the author writes in his introduction, that their manufacturers produced them in a bevy of different colors and designs to better compete in the marketplace. Zevy lays out a rainbow of radios, guiding readers through every single color, providing multiple crisply photographed examples of different radio designs in that color, then asking the reader to pick out the proper color from a set of four each time. Each radio is unusual and quirky, likely identifiable only by older adult readers. “This radio is yellow. This radio is yellow, too. Can you find the yellow radio?” In his introduction, the author describes his passion for old radios, and this truly shines through—the visuals he provides are striking and compelling….The book’s use of repetition is an effective literacy tool…"

From Blue Ink Reviews

Aaron Zevy presents a child’s book of colors, seen through a variety of brightly hued radios from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, in his children’s picture book Retro Radio Rainbow.

Zevy is a collector of classic radios and an author of many books for adults, as well as several for children. Meant as a child’s introduction to colors, this book also serves as a showcase for those distinctive radios.

Based on the pattern of the rainbow, the book shows a radio in a particular color (“This radio is red”). After two examples of radios of a certain color, the text asks the reader to identify that color (“Can you find the red radio?”) in a group of four radios. This simple formula works well, resulting in a book that serves as a functional item—an effective guide to colors—and also an attractive feast for the eyes, combining two purposes much like the sleek radios it displays. The radios shown are truly works of art, and the excellent photographs capture their retro-style beauty.

Zevy’s introduction briefly describes how radios in the 1940s and ’50s were as common as computers in our day and notes that they had an array of designs and colors to stand out in the crowd. While this seems aimed at adults, rather than the toddlers who are most likely the book’s target audience, it provides a charming beginning for those reading to their children.

Thankfully, the book mostly keeps its focus on its stated mission, even offering prime examples of the color indigo, that sometimes hard-to-pinpoint stop on the spectrum between blue and violet. The language is simple and direct, and the book design is bright and fun.

Retro Radio Rainbow is a delightful book that educates young children about the colors of the rainbow in an understandable and unique way.

Also available as an ebook.