National Books Critics Circle - 2024 Finalist: Autobiography One of Washington Post's 50 most notable non-fiction books of 2024 The Minotaur at Calle Lanza  is an unforgettable travel memoir about the mysterious transformations that may lurk inside us all. Venice, 2020. As a pandemic rages across the globe, Zito Madu finds himself in a nearly deserted city, its walls and basilicas humming with strange magic. As he wanders a haunted landscape, we see him twist further into his own past: his family's difficult immigration from Nigeria to Detroit, his troubled relationship with his father, the sporadic joys of daily life and solitude, his experiences with migration, poverty, foreignness, racism, and his own rage and regret. But as it is with all labyrinths, after finding its center, will he come away unscathed, or will he transform into the gripping, fantastical monstrousness that's out to consume him whole? With nods to Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, this surrealist debut memoir takes us into the labyrinth of memory and the monsters lurking there. *Difficult to categorize but hauntingly effective. It has no fail-safe audience but will reward whoever picks it up. ―David Keymer, Library Journal (STARRED REVIEW) From a small village in Nigeria, to the bustling streets of Venice, via the city of Detroit, Zito Madu’s The Minotaur at Calle Lanza is an engaging, even surreal, autobiographical account of travel and the spectacle and fear of the Other. A brilliant debut. ―Ben Carrington “The Minotaur at Calle Lanza is stunningly paradoxical. The deeper you wander into the so-called monster’s labyrinth, the clearer and more affecting his entrapment becomes. With this debut, Madu masterfully entangles the quietude of the pandemic travelogue with the diasporic memoir without cliché, whose contents are equally candid in their curious introspection and romantic in their sensitivity and pictorial prose.” ―Zoe Samudzi This book is mesmerizing. Embedding intimate memories of family and childhood amidst travels through Venice, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza is a transfixing meditation on violence, migration, and the terror of transformation. Subtle and penetrating, exquisitely written and deeply imaginative, this book will endure as a timeless story of one man’s odyssey. ―Michelle Kuo ...elegant meditations on alienation, especially from his own family, but also from the overwhelmingly White world he moves through. His prose has the smooth and constant warmth of blood in a vein, a fluidity so steady it sometimes seems no different from stillness. ―Jacob Brogan, Washington Post "Zito Madu’s The Minotaur at Calle Lanza is truly unlike any other autobiography I’d read before... a smart, deeply engrossing book."―Five Books Zito Madu was born in Nigeria and moved to the United States in 1998. He grew up in Detroit and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. His writing has been published in many publications, including Plough Quarterly , Victory Journal , GQ Magazine , the New Republic , and the Nation .