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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Tag Archives: novel
The Captivating Voice of an Irish Traveller: Gavin Corbett’s ‘This Is the Way’
Over the past few years, thanks in part to a TLC reality show, many of us have become fascinated with Irish Travellers, a group of unsettled people that moves about Ireland in caravans. For the most part, Travellers are a secretive culture, wary of outsiders, and in turn are viewed with a certain amount of disdain by “settled” people. In his second novel, This Is The Way (Faber and Faber; 230 pages), Irish writer Gavin Corbett explores the trials and tribulations of an Irish Traveller in an increasingly rooted world. Anthony Sonaghan fears a rekindled feud between the two halves …Continue reading
A Cult Built Out of Anguish and Desolation: Fiona Maazel’s ‘Woke Up Lonely’
Woke Up Lonely (Graywolf Press, 336 pages), the new novel from author Fiona Maazel (Last Last Chance), is an imaginative thriller about a cult leader and the ex-wife in charge of spying on him. By balancing humorous adventures with an indictment of our modern world, in which solitude reigns despite all the new methods of communication, Maazel delivers a wild read teeming with emotion. Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult based on the principle that lonely people need someone with whom they can share their feelings. At the start of the novel, the Helix has grown …Continue reading
Discovering L.A., and the Mother She Never Knew: Anna Stothard’s ‘The Pink Hotel’
In her second novel, The Pink Hotel (Picador Original, 280 pages), just published in the United States, Anna Stothard tells the tale of a 17-year-old girl’s attempts find out more about the life and death of her party-girl mother, Lily, while on an extended trip to Los Angeles. The book opens on the nameless narrator at the wild, drug-filled party that is meant to be a memorial for Lily, exploring her mother’s room in the Venice Beach hotel she owned. Having been abandoned at the age of three, the narrator barely remembers her mother and the other people at the …Continue reading
On an Island, Making Sense of Loss: Ron Currie Jr.’s ‘Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles’
Ron Currie Jr.’s new novel, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (Viking, 352 pages), begins with an epigraph from the movie Rocky: “women weaken legs.” Currie’s aim is to entertain, but hidden beneath his comedy about a man who cannot have the woman he loves is a heart-wrenching tale of a narrator who loses control of his life in unimaginable ways. The narrator, a writer who happens to be named Ron Currie, Jr., has been obsessed with a woman named Emma since eighth grade. She broke his heart as a teenager, but following her divorce the pair begins a new relationship. When …Continue reading
A Girl’s Honesty Sees Her Through Adults’ Lunacy: Lenore Zion’s ‘Stupid Children’
There’s a lot of good writing out there—an amazing amount, really, considering the ongoing moaning and groaning going on about the “death of literacy’’ and other current cultural shibboleths—but not that much that is truly original, free of clearly demarcated literary influences, antecedents and referents. A thousand Eggers, David Foster Wallaces, let alone Kerouac and Salinger imitators, bloom from every Brooklyn basement and suburban redoubt. All the more remarkable, then, when someone finds a way to make it new, speaking her own truths against the powers of the past. Which makes Los Angeles author Lenore Zion’s first novel, Stupid Children …Continue reading
Galvanized Yet Undone by a Tragedy: Dennis Mahoney’s ‘Fellow Mortals’
On the first page of Dennis Mahoney’s first novel, Fellow Mortals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 277 pages), a fire burns down two houses and damages two more on Arcadia Street. It’s pretty much all downhill from there for the characters. As their lives creep along in the aftermath of that tragedy, Mahoney’s characters show us how a single event can galvanize a group of people yet destroy them at the same time. Infelicitous mailman Henry Cooper starts the blaze on Arcadia Street while trying to light a cigar on his route. The fire demolishes the houses of Nan and Joan …Continue reading
The Weight of Her Husband’s Long Friendship: Joan Frank’s ‘Make It Stay’
As love connects us to our closest friends, these friends can’t help but define us as we grow older. Over time, even the lovers and other friends of these people we hold close become intertwined in our lives. Joan Frank’s fifth book of fiction, her new novel, Make It Stay (The Permanent Press, 160 pages), examines the close friendship between two men, and how their love grows in the face of old age, spouses, children, and tragedy. Neil, a Scottish immigrant, finds his way to the quiet Northern California town of Mira Flores. He meets Mike, the boisterous owner of …Continue reading
History Repeats and Repeats and Repeats: Will Self’s ‘Umbrella’
Will Self’s new novel, Umbrella (Grove Press, 397 pages), is a whirlwind journey through the lives of four characters living in three different eras. A Modernist novel featuring frenetic stream of consciousness writing, Self defies convention and digs deep into the social issues plaguing the 20th century. Audrey Death matures in London at the turn of the century, when underground railroads and automobiles were changing the landscape of the city. Following World War I, which splits Audrey from her brothers Albert and Stanley, she suffers a mental breakdown. Later diagnosed with encephalities lethargica, Audrey is stashed away in Friern Mental …Continue reading
Coming Out of ‘Sleep’ and Back with ‘Rage’: Q&A with Adam Mansbach
As a novelist, Adam Mansbach had been doing all right. His Angry Black White Boy (Broadway) was named a best book of 2005 by the San Francisco Chronicle, and The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau) won a 2008 California Book Award. And although Mansbach now considers it among the fond embarrassments of his youth, even his 2002 debut, Shackling Water (Anchor), was good enough for Library Journal to liken him to James Baldwin. So it seemed like the last thing Mansbach needed to do was swerve into new literary territory, particularly the limited realm of children’s books which …Continue reading
Dignity at the Mercy of a Ruined Economy: Hans Keilson’s ‘Life Goes On’
Originally published in 1933, Hans Keilson’s recently translated first novel, Life Goes On (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 255 pages; translated by Damion Searls), is a gripping story of a family living in post-World War I Germany. Keilson’s autobiographical novel, which came out when he was only twenty-three, is a striking exploration of struggle, shame, and hope, and what it means to live. Life Goes On follows the lives of the Seldersens as they face the economic turbulence sweeping Germany. Herr Seldersen, a veteran of the Great War, runs a small shop with his wife. Even as they try to make …Continue reading
Brazil’s Complex Past, Recounted from a Deathbed: Chico Buarque’s ‘Spilt Milk’
Musician and author Chico Buarque came of age with the installment of a brutal military dictatorship in Brazil, one that was to last for more than twenty years until it toppled in 1985. A pioneer and experimenter within bossa nova, Buarque wrote subtle lyrics protesting the regime’s violent suppression of dissidents, songs that made it into his country’s popular consciousness. To this day Buarque is regarded in Brazil as a vital cultural stalwart, an artist who, since the early ‘60s, continues to examine his country and instill large social change. His most recent novel, Spilt Milk (Grove/Atlantic, 177 pages, translated …Continue reading
An Alternative Universe, One Where Her Son Still Lives: J. Robert Lennon’s ‘Familiar’
Somewhere on an Ohio interstate, where bored drivers can be counted on to whiz past the paranormal events happening in a middle-aged woman’s Honda, a crack in Elisa Brown’s windshield transports her from one brief, thirteen-page-long reality—of facts and blunt tragedy—to another. She finds her fingers gripping a different steering wheel, her toes jammed inside pumps instead of her usual sneakers, a husband who actually calls to see when she’ll arrive home, and, in place of her once bony frame, a plumper one that hasn’t suffered the death of her youngest son, Silas. J. Robert Lennon’s new novel, Familiar (Graywolf …Continue reading
