Tag: q&a

5 Questions for City Lights

by John McMurtrie

Posted on by John McMurtrie

City Lights, the San Francisco bookstore cherished the world over, is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. Founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin as the first all-paperback bookstore in the country, the North Beach landmark today stocks a great variety of titles (no longer just paperbacks) on three floors. Elaine Katzenberger, the publisher of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, has worked at the store since 1987. ZYZZYVA asked her to inaugurate our new weekly feature devoted to independent bookstores. She answered our questions from New York City, where she accepted the National Book Critics Circle’s Toni Morrison Achievement […]

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Q&A with Madelaine Lucas: ‘Thirst for Salt’ and the Roots of Desire

by Valerie Braylovskiy

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Madelaine Lucas’s first novel, Thirst for Salt (272 pages; Tin House Books), centers on an unnamed female narrator and her love for an older man, offering profound reflections on how the absence of affection can still take up space in one’s life. Throughout the story, notions of desire are uprooted by the impermanence of relationships, places, and the self. Lucas writes with a poetic precision that captures the sharp and mellow edges of love, as well as its intersections with grief. Born in Australia, Lucas now lives in New York, where she is senior editor of the literary magazine NOON […]

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Q&A with Colin Winnette: ‘Users’ and the Underbelly of Tech

by Charlie Barton

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Colin Winnette’s latest novel, Users (271 pages; Soft Skull Press), is much less about virtual reality than the creative minds behind it. The protagonist Miles works at a VR firm as the lead creative and is tasked with hatching up new ideas for future products. He’s well-respected and well-paid, the creator of Ghost Lover, a popular simulation in which the user is haunted by a former flame. His personal life, however, is much less secure: his marriage is precarious, and his children can be difficult and unrelatable. Miles’s anxiety is spurred by the arrival of death threats. But the pressure […]

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Q&A with Rebecca Foust: ‘Only’ & Communicating Across the Centuries

by Meryl Natchez

Posted on by Zack Ravas

I first met Rebecca Foust when we worked together for Marin Poetry Center starting in 2014. Foust is the author of seven poetry collections, including The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, Paradise Drive, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, and God, Seed. Her work has received the  2020 Pablo Neruda Award, the 2017 CP Cavafy Award,  and the 2016 James Hearst Poetry Prize, and was runner up for the 2022 Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. In 2017 she was appointed Marin County Poetry Laureate. I have been intrigued by her new book of poems, Only (Four Way Books 2022; 88 pages), a varied, tender, […]

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A Conversation with Kathryn Ma

by John McMurtrie

Posted on by Zack Ravas

The title of Kathryn Ma’s new novel, The Chinese Groove, refers to one young man’s fanciful term for a silent understanding that he believes unites Chinese people across borders and throughout generations. This code, he is convinced, is what will guide him as he leaves behind a life of poverty in Yunnan Province and embarks

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Air Sirens Wailed: Q&A with Maria Galina and Arkady Shtypel

by Ilya Kaminsky

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Visiting Odesa, Ukraine, this July, I met with Maria Galina and Arkady Shtypel, two well-known Russian-language poets who decided to leave Moscow for Odesa before the war began. Maria Galina is the author of several books of fiction, including the novels Little Boondock, Mole-Crickets, and Iramifications, which was published in English by GLAS New Russian Writing. She is also a prize-winning poet and literary critic and a regular columnist for the literary journal Novyi Mir. Arkady Shtypel‘s debut poetry collection was published when he was fifty-eight. Since then, he has published five more books of poetry. He is also a […]

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Q&A with Emil DeAndreis: ‘Tell Us When to Go’ & a Changing San Francisco

by Isabelle Edgar

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Emil DeAndreis’ third novel, Tell Us When to Go (260 pages; Flexible Press), follows two college friends, Cole and Isaac, as their journey into post-recession San Francisco pulls them in very different directions. It’s a humorous and heartfelt story of friendship and baseball and the growing pains of both the city they love and the people who love it. DeAndreis, who is also the author of Beyond Folly (2013)and Hard to Grip (2017), teaches English at College of San Mateo. This interview was conducted over email and has been edited for length and clarity. ZYZZYVA: San Francisco feels like a […]

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Q&A with Deborah A. Miranda: On the 10th Anniversary of ‘Bad Indians’

by Maura Krause

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Deborah A. Miranda’s multi-genre memoir, Bad Indians, was first published by Heyday Books in 2013 to great critical acclaim. Miranda uses found text, poetry, fiction, and personal essay to create a gorgeous and devastating reflection on not only her childhood, but on California Indians as a community since the establishment of the mission system in 1776. With darkly playful subversiveness, Miranda frames the book as her belated Fourth-Grade Mission Project: an assignment that all California fourth-graders are required to do as part of their sanitized mission history unit. This ground-breaking book won the 2015 PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Literary Award as […]

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Q&A with Edie Meidav: ‘Another Love Discourse’ and Writing in the Time of the Apocalypse

by Jordan Pollock

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In a time when we are more isolated and removed from other human beings than ever, Edie Meidav’s writing offers us the rare opportunity for intimacy and closeness. In her recently published novel, Another Love Discourse (326 pages; Terra Nova/MIT Press), Meidav explores motherhood, old romances, and new love in a lyrical and adaptable form. The influence of experimental writer Roland Barthes serves as guide and inspiration for what Rick Moody, Jonathan Lethem, Margot Douaihy and others describe as Meidav’s boldest work yet. Along with being the author of the novels Lola, California (FSG/Picador), Crawl Space (FSG), and the story […]

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Q&A with Karin Lin-Greenberg: ‘Vanished’ and the Art of Life

by Christine Sneed

Posted on by Zack Ravas

One of qualities I admire most about Karin Lin-Greenberg’s stories is their comic undercurrent, the subversive eye paired with an unflinching one that registers the world and its inhabitants with clarity and powerfully affecting insights into the complex, sometimes ruthless emotional negotiations of adolescence and adulthood. Her writing is at once lucid and engrossing, the kind of fiction that unfurls so seamlessly the final page arrives long before I’m ready to part ways with her characters. Her first story collection, Faulty Predictions (2014), won the Flannery O’Connor Prize, and her first novel, You Are Here, will be published in May […]

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Rebecca Rukeyser & Liska Jacobs in conversation on ‘The Pink Hotel’ and ‘The Seaplane on Final Approach’

by Rebecca Rukeyser & Liska Jacobs

Posted on by Zack Ravas

I read Liska Jacob’s The Pink Hotel (336 pages; MCD) at the end of this summer. August is an unwholesome month, especially in Berlin. The city becomes a swamp, and every bakery display case is filled with wasps feeding on poppyseed cake and apple strudel. But reading the gleefully anarchic The Pink Hotel is the most unwholesome thing I did this August. I mean that as the highest compliment. This book lulls you with the low incessant murmur of opulence. You begin with healthy skepticism toward the trappings of obscene wealth, but diamond watches start to sound pretty. Daily spa […]

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Q&A with Kathleen Balma: ‘From Your Hostess at the T&A Museum’ and the Urgent Need to Describe

by Danielle Shi

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Kathleen Balma demonstrates a prodigious fluency with language in her intelligent and entertaining first poetry collection, From Your Hostess at the T&A Museum (96 pages; Eyewear Publishing), in which monkeys battle for social cachet, time grounds to a startling weather-bending halt, and voices become vehicles of desire when arriving at the right destination. Cleverly imagining the ordinary into shapes exceptional and witty, Balma uses an affectionate yet sardonic tongue to interrogate images as familiar to us as Abe Lincoln’s cabin to the ruins of Pompeii to the moon landing. For aficionados of art history, visual splendor abounds: Olympia and Aphrodites […]

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