Welcome to the newest feature on our website: the ZYZZYVA Video Series—featuring short readings and interviews with ZYZZYVA’s many contributors. We kick off our series with Vauhini Vara, whose story “We Were Here” appears in ZYZZYVA No. 101. Vara, whose fiction has been honored with an O’Henry Award, is also an award-winning journalist. Having worked at the Wall Street Journal for nearly a decade, she now covers technology and business for the NewYorker.com, where she was previously the business editor. Managing Editor Oscar Villalon talked with Vara about “We Were Here,” as well as about her career as a journalist. […]
Tag: journalism
Hacks: ZYZZYVA No. 100
by Jim Gavin
Jim Gavin, the author of the critically acclaimed story collection Middle Men (which was long-listed for the 2014 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize), first appeared in ZYZZYVA No. 63 (“Recommendation”). For the 100th issue, he contributed a hilarious piece of nonfiction, the stinging “Hacks.”
The story of Gavin’s stint as a young man in the world of community newspapers, “Hacks” recalls the grubby lifestyle that comes with being a grunt on the sports desk: attending endless high school meets, living off of Mountain Dew and Del Taco, working with colleagues who could stand a shower. But it is also an early glimpse into what the writing life can mean—a calling of shabby nobility, a difficult vocation in which one tries to “record and instill with grandeur the lives of people who will never be famous.”
The following is an excerpt from “Hacks.” You can read the piece in its entirety, of course, in the 100th issue, which can order here.
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