ZYZZYVA Events
- May 17, 2013
ZYZZYVA Spring Release at Diesel
Location: 7 p.m., Diesel Bookstore, 5433 College Ave., Oakland
Description: Come celebrate the release of Issue No. 97 with readings from contributors Molly Giles, Marianna Cherry, Alexandra Teague, & Aaron Jae-Ho Shin. Editors Laura Cogan & Oscar Villalon host. Free. For more info, visit http://bit.ly/15REYYI
- May 22, 2013
Luis Negron in Conversation with Oscar Villalon
Location: 7 p.m., City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco
Description: Negron, an acclaimed Puerto Rican journalist, editor, and writer, will discuss his debut story collection, "Mundo Cruel" (Seven Stories), with ZYZZYVA's managing editor. Free. For more info, visit http://bit.ly/1449E5v
- June 13, 2013
National Book Critics Circle Mixer at ZYZZYVA
Location: 6 p.m., ZYZZYVA, 466 Geary St., Suite 401, San Francisco
Description: Celebrate the summer with an informal mixer hosted by the NBCC and ZYZZYVA editors Laura Cogan and Oscar Villalon. Free to NBCC members and those interested in learning more about the organization.
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Monthly Archives: April 2011
The Giraffe
Robin Ekiss, a former managing editor at ZYZZYVA, has been a waterslide attendant and an AFL/CIO meat cutter. She’s also an accomplished poet. Her first collection of poems, The Mansion of Happiness (2009), was published by the University of Georgia Press. Her work also has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, APR, POETRY, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Black Warrior Review, and VQR.
“The Giraffe” is one of her two poems in the Spring 2011 issue of ZYZZYVA. Only ten lines long, its compactness belies its intricacy. Along with Tom Barbash and Vanessa Hua, she will be reading at the Booksmith in San Francisco on May 4.
Deb Olin Unferth’s ‘Revolution’ and the Costs of Memoir
Save some long-mothballed, early twentieth-century avant-garde movements, memoir may be the only literary genre requiring a statement of principles. This applies to readers and writers alike. Do you expect a memoirist to show perfect recall, to reconstruct a past with vividly described environments, clear dialogue, and novelistic scenes? Or do you want a memoirist to admit the fallibility of her memory? Perhaps in an introductory preface, and to confess that some scenes, characters, and timelines may be elided, compressed, combined — i.e., do you mind if she makes things up, as long as it’s in the service of a good …Continue reading
The Third Daughter
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Vanessa Hua is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the Economist, The New York Times, and Newsweek. A graduate of UC Riverside’s MFA program, she she won the Atlantic Monthly’s student fiction contest in 2008, and in 2005 won Cream City Review’s fiction contest.
The following is an excerpt from her story in the Spring 2011 issue of ZYZZYVA — a story taken from her finished unpublished novel, Without Heaven. The novel was inspired, Hua says, by “documentary footage of Chairman Mao swing dancing with teen age girls … After stumbling across a short clip, I wanted to learn more about the recruits for this dance troupe. There wasn’t much information available, which gave me the room necessary to work on a novel.”
She will be reading from her story at the ZYZZYVA event at the Booksmith in San Francisco on May 4, and at the ZYZZYVA event at Skylight Books in Los Angeles on May 14.
Mistakes Were Made, Errors Happened
Journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld is perhaps best known for Boy Alone, his searing, candid memoir of growing up with a severely autistic brother. In this story published in the Fall 2010 issue of ZYZZYVA, Greenfeld turns his talent for unsparing prose on a young man’s turbulent summer in Japan. The title, derived from a characteristically restrained Japanese turn of phrase, offers a dry counterpoint to the magnitude of the missteps chronicled here. What was meant to be a summer-long interlude between high school and college (sustained by a respectable job as a messenger) devolves rapidly into a debauchery of theft, drugs, and prostitution. As our confident and careless young narrator careens headlong into chaos, Greenfeld keeps the up the tension amid a dark cloud of humor.
PEN World Voices Heads to the West Coast
The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature begins April 25, but you don’t have to live near Manhattan to get a taste of what the festival has to offer: stellar authors from around the globe communing with their American peers and readers. Along with stops in the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Eastern Seaboard, the PEN World Voices Festival tour will be coming to the West Coast from May 2 to May 4. Rahul Bhattacharya, whose first novel, “The Sly Company of People Who Care” (FSG), has earned him comparisons to V.S. Naipaul, and acclaimed (and banned) author Yan …Continue reading
Before Goldman Knew of Great Loss There Was First Knowing Great Love
On a hot, bright July day in 2007, author Francisco Goldman waded into the Pacific surf off Mazunte, Mexico. His wife, Aura Estrada, watched him bodysurf, catching a wave and riding it twenty yards back toward the shore, and decided she’d like to do the same. As the next wave approached, she called out, “This one’s mine!” That powerful wave left Aura unconscious, floating in the shallow waters near the beach, and although she regained consciousness and fought for her life in the hours that followed, she did not survive. Say Her Name (Grove; 350 pages) is Goldman’s wrenching but …Continue reading
Frida & Diego, or Among Musicians Only
Things Lost in Translation
Devreaux Baker is a Northern California poet and the author of many collections, including Red Willow People (2010), published by Wild Ocean Press in San Francisco. She also produces the Mendocino Coast Poetry Reading Series and produced “The Voyagers Radio Program of Original Student Writing,” which aired on KZYX Public Radio.
“Things Lost in Translation” appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of ZYZZYVA. (You can get a copy here.) Baker’s poem could be described as a romantic plea, urging the beloved to allow the speaker full knowledge of his or her life. “Empty the words from your pockets/rearrange the stars if you have to,/ but tell me something untold before/”
Tennessee Williams’ Bird-Girl of Glorious Hill: Theater Review
The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, a lesser-known work by Tennessee Williams being staged by the Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley, is the story of Alma Winemiller, the odd, intelligent daughter of the Episcopalian rector in the town of Glorious Hill, Mississippi. When the play opens, Alma’s attempts to fit in are driving her frantic, while even her most modest pleasures (organizing a cultural club, feeding the birds in the town square) make her an object of ridicule. Her father, Reverend Winemiller (played by Charles Dean), suffers continually under the burden of his mad wife and the scandal of her sister’s …Continue reading
Discovering Shostakovich’s True Voice in His Fifteen Quartets
Before he could reach the keys of a piano, Dmitri Shostakovich showed a secret interest in music. “When our neighbors played quartets, I would put my ear to the wall and listen.” As Wendy Lesser points out in her new book, Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets (Yale University Press; 368 pages), this image — of the composer as an eavesdropping child — is an apt one for an artist who spent his life under surveillance by the Soviet regime. In her ninth book, Lesser, founding editor of The Threepenny Review, argues that the man best known …Continue reading
