In the Winter Issue
Picking up where we left off with our Fall issue (No. 92), the newest issue of ZYZZYVA is packed with 200 pages of great writing and visual art from the best of West Coast writers and artists.
Here’s what’s inside:
- Fiction from Karen Joy Fowler (on a righteous break up at a UC Davis dining hall), Adam Johnson (on the Greatest North Korean Story of All Time!), and Herbert Gold (on a Stanford golden girl gone bad)
- A one-act play by Barry Gifford on Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn and a couple of Yankees players on the finca in Cuba
- Verse from Melina Draper, Dean Rader, Kascha Semonovitch, Joseph Di Prisco, Amber Flora Thomas, Floyd Skloot, and David Wagoner
- Essays from Gary Soto (on stirring the contempt of the hometown fans) and Carter Scholz (marveling at the astronomical accuracy of Kenneth Rexroth’s poetry), and a marvelous short story by Katie Chase on vendettas, short lives and youth football
- Andrew Foster Altschul’s atmospheric fiction about a road trip that takes a left turn toward some kind of eternity, Faith Gardner’s arresting tale of a young dog-walker losing her grip, and Jackie Bang’s story on the peculiar family put together by “the Miner” and “the Collector”
- And introducing Josh DuBose (and his brightly comic story of a bad honeymoon in Cozumel) and Patrick McGinty (and his darkly comic story, “Final Letter from a Crossing Guard”)
The Winter issue also features full-color paintings from Carson Murdach and Michael Brennan, the mysterious ambrotypes of Susan Seubert, and Reid Yalom’s meditative photographs of the French colonial legacy in Vietnam.
Get your four-issue subscription to ZYZZYVA now, and start with the Winter issue. Copies are limited.
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Melinda, Doing Her Best
Herbert Gold is the author of such novels as Birth of a Hero (1951), The Man Who Was Not With It (1956), and Fathers (1967), as well as of the nonfiction works Haiti: Best Nightmare on Earth (2001) and the memoir Still Alive! A Temporary Condition (2008).
“Melinda, Doing Her Best,” which appears in ZYZZYVA’s Winter 2011 issue, is a story set sometime in ’90s San Francisco, back when Moose’s was open in North Beach and when dot-com money was pouring into the city. That the title character is a computer programmer on the outs, then, is particularly striking. It’s tempting to read Melinda as a harbinger of the high tech good times gone sour. But the story is primarily a troubling depiction of a woman everybody wants something from, a person truly alone.
Enter Harlow
Karen Joy Fowler is the prize-winning author of many books, including the novels Sister Noon, Wit’s End, and the best-seller The Jane Austen Book Club. Her most recent book is the story collection What I Didn’t See (Small Beer Press).
“Enter Harlow,” her new fiction in ZYZZYVA‘s Winter issue, is further testament to what Michael Chabon has said about her work: “No contemporary writer creates characters more appealing, or examines them with greater acuity and forgiveness, than she does.” Set at UC Davis during the ’90s, the story, which comes from the opening pages of a novel-in-progress, follows a young woman “meandering” through her fourth year of school. “Enter Harlow” tells how that meandering is suddenly, spectacularly interrupted — in the school cafeteria. The following is an excerpt from the story.
Get Lost
Faith Gardner is a writer and musician living in Oakland. She plays guitar and sings in the bands Hooray for Everything and Dark Beach, and performs solo as Scarlett O’Hara. Her writing has appeared in PANK, Word Riot, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and many other places.
“Get Lost” appears in the Winter 2011 issue of ZYZZYVA. About a young woman who is suddenly without her best friend, who moved with her to San Francisco, Gardner’s story is appealingly downbeat, somewhat sinister, and surprisingly humorous as it follows a person gone adrift in an unfamiliar city and looking everywhere for her bearings. The following is an excerpt from the story.
The Twelve Friends of Rodolfo and Mimi
My husband settles back on the couch with his coffee.
“I’ve been indulging this bizarre, wacko fantasy,” he says.
Oh, dear.
He’ll want to fly to his hometown’s soccer field for Christmas. (Blackburn, Lancashire: identification with the home team is tribal.) Or start ballroom dancing lessons. Rip out the grass and plant cactus in the yard. Kayak the Nile.
It’s the first day of November’s last week. He takes twenty minutes to “thaw out” in the morning, as my dad used to term it, before hopping on his bicycle to go to work. I am doing yogic stretches on the carpet. Our new poinsettia glows blood-red in the window. Outside, cold fog.
“What if you could turn around Rodolfo and Mimi’s situation, at the the beginning of La Boheme,” he says.
I sit up. “What do you mean?”
Appealing More and More to the Ear: Literature and Audio Books
Dear reader, I did not intend to get the audio book. When I walked into the Berkeley Public Library a few months ago, looking for a copy of Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library, I don’t think I had intentions toward any particular format. If pressed at the time to reveal my implicit biases, I would probably have said I was looking for a physical, bound paper-and-cloth book, a book-book. (For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to such objects as “books”). Unfortunately, The Swimming Pool Library and The Line of Beauty—Hollinghurst’s Booker prize-winning fourth novel—were both checked out, each with many holds. But the audio versions were available. Without thinking much of it, I checked them out, loaded them onto my iPod and started listening.
Although audio books have been around for years, decades actually, the medium seems in recent months to have taken hold of the popular imagination. Public Affairs publisher Peter Osnos recently predicted a resurgence of audio books on The Atlantic website. And a few months ago the New York Times Book Review ran a pair of essays on audio books (alongside audio book ads from nearly every major publisher). In one of these pieces, John Schwartz defends himself against those friends who think he is “settling for a kind of second-rate reading” by exploring the possibility that he might be “wired for sound.” In his essay, James Parker historicizes the conflict between literature that appeals to the ear and that which appeals to the eye, pivoting on Oscar Wilde’s wonderful and very relevant quote: “Since the introduction of printing, there has been a tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which is really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always.” Although interesting, these essays (and most other essays I have read on the subject) ignore the simplest, and I think most important factor in all this, the pleasure of listening to a story. Now, I’m not one to bash the physical book—I’m prepared to start printing my own if publishers, in some dystopian future, see fit to switch entirely to e-books—but I also won’t deny the unique sense of enjoyment I experienced when I popped in my earbuds and started listening to The Swimming Pool Library.
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Tagged Alan Hollinghurst, audio books, James Parker, John Schwarz, Peter Osnos
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A Fortunate Literary Community in L.A.: Wendy C. Ortiz and Rhapsodomancy
In Los Angeles, a person can’t get anywhere in seven minutes. There’s no Muni, BART, quaint Italian streetcar or the tried and true 22 Fillmore. Attending readings can be a chore that involves multiple freeway changes and nail biting, bumper-to-bumper traffic. It’s difficult to lure people out for free drinks, a cheese plate, and a discounted literary journal here, where an iffy parking situation can make or break an event.
In L.A., I show up to readings because I value the time spent crafting a story, the twenty-four revisions and the manic rehearsals that go into a reading. I know the shoulder knots from hovering over a computer too long while buzzing in a caffeine trance. A few of us Antioch grads still regularly write together and rely on each other for input and support. We tap away on keyboards until our wrists are sore, our fingers numb and our necks tweaked. We pop Advil like Tic-Tacs and stare at computer screens until we’re reduced to giggle fits.
I go to local readings to hear my friend’s work because I believe that the next to impossible is still possible: Our literary community will hold strong in a place where celebrity culture reigns supreme.
While bookstores close across the country, writers in L.A. bring their prose to art galleries, bars, and cafés and read their poised work — stories bleeding wrath and heartache, violence and unrequited love. If it means driving an hour to cheer on and hear a friend’s stories we do it.
On an uncharacteristically chilly Sunday night, at the Good Luck Bar in Los Feliz in early December, four writers unfazed by the ghost of bookstores-past arrived for a quarterly reading series called Rhapsodomancy.
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Tagged Andrea Quaid, Antioch, Eloise Klein Healy, Los Angeles, reading series, Rhapsodomancy, Wendy C. Ortiz
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Summoning the Achingly Beautiful Out of Strife: Craig Thompson’s ‘Habibi’
There are some artists and writers that truly utilize the medium of comic books and graphic novels to create a unique narrative experience that only sequential art can deliver. Craig Thompson is one of those individuals.
Following the success of his semi-autobiographical Blankets, Thompson has once again given readers a poignant and sincere tale of love and spirituality in Habibi (Pantheon; 672 pages). Set in a world that is both historical and modern, mixing epic deserts and extravagant palaces with modern city landscapes and industrial wastelands, readers follow Dodola and Zam, two children who escape from slavery by fleeing to the desert. They struggle against a world of greed, lust, and refuse, which forces their paths apart. It is their evolving spirituality, their love for each other and for storytelling that moves them to find each other again.
Habibi contains a cast of characters that are sympathetic and cartoonish. Dodola, Zam and a number of supporting characters are achingly human, while the simpler characters in the story are there to either propel the plot forward or to reinforce the narrative’s symbolic qualities.
Thompson’s writing makes great use of Islam, sharing many of its teachings, tales, and lessons concurrently with Dodola and Zam’s story, providing a lens to view their circumstances and to inform past and future events in the story. Thompson also uses Islam as a guide for navigating Habibi’s many themes, such as romantic and familial relationships, our ties to nature, and the consequences of wastefulness. And as if trying to combat post-9/11 antagonism toward Islam, Habibi showcases the faith’s beauty.
For a graphic novel, the art is just as important, of course, as the writing. Throughout, Thompson’s ink work is nothing short of awe-inspiring, especially in the book’s many breathtaking double-page spreads. The amount of detail is unbelievable; one can see why it took Thompson eight years to follow-up Blankets. And the compositions within each panel are moving and full of life, as if each panel can tell a story of its own. He also does an admirable job of controlling the pacing of the reader’s eye — and, as a result, the pace of the story — through placement of the words and the layout of the panels. Page layouts easily draw the eye to where Thompson wants it to go, and in many cases creates beautiful eye lines across pages, creating an almost musical rhythm to his storytelling.
Habibi is a prime example of what could never be done with words or art alone, and why sequential art exists. It is an ambitious landmark work in the history of the graphic novel.
The Wear and Tear of a Boy’s Life: Roy Jacobsen’s ‘Child Wonder’
Roy Jacobsen’s coming-of-age novel, Child Wonder (Graywolf Press; 239 pages), offers a well-crafted metaphor for the cultural transformations of Norway in the 1960s – a time “[b]efore oil,” as Jacobsen writes in the foreword, “before anyone had any money at all.” The book, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, is also a romance of youth, filled with nostalgia and secrets, rage and violence. And, of course, transformations. Suddenly, for Finn, the story’s narrator and hero, things become “brighter,” eyes become “bluer.”
Though he is an emotionally rich, thoughtful and observant character, Finn still acts out like a mouthy, rambunctious nine-year old. He is cynical like Holden Caulfield, isolated like Oskar Schell, and as wildly impulsive as Huck Finn but with the internal reserve of Tom Sawyer. And he contains violence. To Jacobsen’s credit, the trait that shines brightest about Finn is his joyfulness. It is a pleasure to read about him swimming distances “immeasurable in metres or happiness,” or his climbing, fighting, and stealing views of a nude sunbather. This all takes place during “the most everlasting of all summers,” when Finn, on the outset, realizes “I was no child any more and yet I was, and I wanted to be neither, but someone else, again.”
Both Outside and Inside the Literary World: Q&A with Dagoberto Gilb
Dagoberto Gilb (photo by Jean-Luc Bertini)
Dagoberto Gilb is arguably the most critically acclaimed Mexican American author writing today, with a publication resume few writers of any background can claim: The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, Harper’s, Texas Monthly, The New York Times, The Nation. The author of six books, he won a PEN/Hemingway Award for his first story collection The Magic of Blood (1993), which was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner. His first novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna (1995), was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, and his second novel, The Flowers (2008), was praised by Larry McMurtry and named one of the Best Books of the Year by The San Francisco Chronicle. Gritos, his 2003 collection of essays, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. He has received a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has appeared in the Best American Essays and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is now the executive director of Centro Victoria: Center for Mexican American Literature and Culture.
Originally from Los Angeles (his story “Shout” appeared in ZYZZYVA’s Winter 1987 issue), Gilb has since lived in Texas: El Paso and now Austin, his home. His new book, the story collection Before the End, After the Beginning (Grove; 194 pages), reflects that, with pieces set in all three places. The book’s ten stories also pick up the working-class MexAm (as Gilb likes to call Mexican Americans) milieu from his past works and make the exquisitely careful explorations of the human condition — love and lust, identity and confusion, weakness and death – his readers have come to expect and revere him for. Before the End, After the Beginning is, simply, a marvelous book by one of the country’s best story writers, period.
Over e-mail, Gilb talked about his career (despite all the accolades, his “writing gets treated as if it’s from my groin, with my muscles, from my spicy juices—and NEVER my brain”), Latino literature (“History is what we are in. These are early years in the literary Latino-ization of America”) and the new book.
Luis Alberto Urrea and the Power of a Captivating Reading
Luis Alberto Urrea is an amazing writer. The beloved, multi-prize winning author of novels, nonfiction, and poetry, Urrea’s most recent book, Queen of America, is (as I wrote in a review that appeared in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle) “at once magical and corporeal, grounding and transporting. … The compelling true story of a young woman caught between worlds, between her childhood in Mexico and her adulthood in the United States, between the spiritual world and the material world.” But here I want to discuss Urrea’s reading, his ability to transfix an audience through the spoken word.
The first time I came across Luis Alberto Urrea’s name was last summer. After hearing Urrea read at a writers’ conference, one of my friends posted a raving status update on Facebook, something along the lines of: Luis Alberto Urrea just melted my face off. A couple weeks later, another writerly friend wrote, also on Facebook, that we are all but ants in the world of Luis Alberto Urrea. A month after later, a third friend told me that Urrea’s readings are the ideal she aspired to one day achieve, and I thought: either Urrea’s publisher is running a highly successful guerilla social media marketing campaign or he is an amazing public speaker.
Once a staid staple of the writer’s life, literary readings have, in the past couple years, come under renewed scrutiny. Publishers looking to cut costs see book tours as an unnecessary expense that doesn’t really help sales. At the same time, some independent bookstores have started charging for readings. In response to the latter trend, freelance writer and critic Alizah Salario writes in a post on The Millions:
“The underlying problem with charging for readings isn’t the cost (though even a few bucks will deter the cash-strapped) but that the very notion of payment turns readings into something they are not: artistic commodities. Authors are not performers; their readings are not meant to be entertaining in a splashy musical sort of way. Readings exist to promote and sell books, but they also serve a more important function: they provide space for writers and readers to directly communicate and transmit ideas, taking the solitary slow drip of the reading process and infusing it directly into the bloodstream.”
I don’t think readings are “meant to be entertaining in a splashy musical sort of way” nor would I suggest that writers should put on a song and dance or pass out cookies, as Salario writes later in her piece. But I do think that a writer should try his or her best to be entertaining, whether the audience has paid or not. Writers are not performers, true. But it’s disingenuous to argue that a reading is not a performance. One could refuse to give readings a la Pynchon or Salinger (though that, I would argue, is also a type of performance). But once you are standing on the stage, once you have an audience and a microphone in your face, you are a performer. So why not try to put on a good show? As Emily St. John Mandel writes, also in The Millions:
“Reading one’s work aloud is a difficult art. Doing it well requires a certain stage presence, and a small degree of talent as a live entertainer: in other words, more or less the exact opposite of the skills you needed to actually sit down and write your book in the first place. Given that the skill sets involved in writing and reading aloud are so different, I’ve found that it’s a rare writer who can give a memorable reading. (By “memorable,” I mean “memorable in a good way.” I’ve been to some memorably bad ones.) More often than not we speak too quickly, or in a monotone, or way too dramatically when the material doesn’t call for it (“and then… she poured the coffee… into a cup.”)”
Whether the performance takes the form of Urrea’s animated raconteuring, the urgent torrent of Deb Olin Unferth and Ben Marcus, D.A. Powell’s sly sledgehammer, or Matt Bell’s poetic incantation, a good reading is memorable and inspiring. And if a reading inspires someone to pick up a book they might not have otherwise, what’s wrong with that?
The Slippery Nature of Nonfiction: Q&A with Jackie Bang
Jackie Bang (photo by Ahmed Freundlich )
Jackie Bang’s story “Silver Mailbox,” which appears in the Winter 2011 issue of ZYZZYVA, is either a heavily fictionalized piece of nonfiction or a heavily factual piece of fiction. Or perhaps something else. The story of a Washington couple — the Miner and the Collector — and the recently-arrived infants brought into their brood, it’s a stylized piece of writing that leaves you eager to learn of the fates of these strange but compelling people. We talked to Jackie Bang via email about her story and the larger work of hers from which it’s taken.
ZYZZYVA: “Silver Mailbox” is the first story from a work-in-progress of yours. Could you tell me more about this larger work?
Jackie Bang: Yes, “Silver Mailbox” is currently the first story in True Tales of the Incognito Circus, a nonfiction book I’m working on that hopscotches between my humble beginnings and my humble now; it is an anti-memoir (a memoir that challenges the general rules and expectations of memoir), a book that gives equal consideration to the faux-horror film Gremlins and to the origins of certain Mormon doctrine. I think aside from this humility (i.e., the being-poor aspect) what binds all these stories together is the recognition that absurdity might as well be grace.
