The Loneliness of the Electric Menorah Book

Aaron Cometbus has been writing zines since before most people knew what a zine was. That's not a flex, it's just context for understanding why this book hits differently to most punk-adjacent social history.

The Loneliness of the Electric Menorah is a slow, specific, deeply felt piece of regional and cultural excavation, mapping Jewish communities across the United States through the particular lens of someone who came up in the punk underground and never stopped paying attention to the edges of things. Cometbus writes the way the best zines always did: personal, political, unhurried, and obsessed with the details everyone else walks past. If you've read his Cometbus zine, you know the frequency. If you haven't, this is as good a place to start as any.

Paperback. Essential reading for anyone who believes punk culture and literary subculture belong in the same room.