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ZYZZYVA Events
July 17, 2019In Conversation with Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Location: 6 p.m., Koret Auditorium, Main Library, San Francisco
Description: Rojas Contreras, the author of the novel "Fruit of the Drunken Tree," recently released in paperback, will discuss her work with Managing Editor Oscar Villalon. Free. More info here: https://www.facebook.com/events/2360638860885338/
July 24, 2019In Conversation with Peter Orner
Location: 7:30 p.m., The Bindery, 1727 Haight St., San Francisco
Description: Orner, the author of the novel "Love and Shame and Love" and a contributor to ZYZZYVA, will discuss his new story collection, "Maggie Brown & Others" (Little, Brown), with Managing Editor Oscar Villalon. Free. More info here: https://www.booksmith.com/event/bindery-peter-orner-maggie-brown-and-others-stories
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Monthly Archives: November 2013
A Black Family’s Fantastical Cuban History: Carlos Acosta’s ‘Pig’s Foot’
Günter Grass begins his magical realist masterpiece The Tin Drum by explaining that “no one ought to tell the story of his life who hasn’t the patience to say a word or two about at least half of his grandparents before plunging into his own existence.” In Pig’s Foot (Bloomsbury, 333 pages), Carlos Acosta’s first novel (translated by Frank Wynne), the narrator more than abides by this advice. Pig’s Foot is the story of the narrator, told from the very beginning, when his great-great-grandmother arrives as a slave in Cuba in the 1800s. Acosta’s novel, set in a remote and …Continue reading
Balancing Being Herself and Being True to the Author: Q&A with Silvia Pareschi
In his novel Freedom, Jonathan Franzen has one of his characters make a pun that would make anyone groan. “Nor-fock-a-Virginia!” a character says in a fake Italian accent. When his German translator asked for clarification, Franzen explained: “Punchline of a pun about an Italian who won’t fuck virgins. The pun refers to the city of Norfolk, Virginia. Anything that works in German and is both dirty and refers to Italy or Italians would be fine with me.” If it was hard to come up with a solution in German, it was almost impossible in Italian: “It had to be something …Continue reading
An Evolution Beyond Gender in the Wild West: Cutting Ball Theater’s ‘Sidewinder’
For the world premiere of Basil Kreimendahl’s hilarious and tenderhearted play Sidewinders (directed by M. Graham Smith), the Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco has flipped its performance space, arranging the stands of chairs so the stage is deeper than it is wide. Papier mache clouds hang from the ceiling, casting shadows on the clouds painted on the walls, creating an illusion of depth (lighting design by Heather Basarab). The stage seems to open up in front of us on three sides. The set, designed by Michael Locher, is dotted with sandy colored, flat-topped stumps, like desert mesas in miniature. …Continue reading
With Mercer Out of the Hospital, ‘Swearing in English’ Finally Has Its Big Night
Earlier this year, when Oakland actor and author John Mercer was due to take the stage for the opening night of his one-man show drawn from his memoir/essay collection, Swearing in English: Tall Tales at Shotgun, he was otherwise occupied: he was in the hospital with viral encephalitis, a life-threatening illness that would keep him there for 11 days. The advertised shows were cancelled, and the book launch never happened. (You can read more about the memoir here.) Now Mercer, who is a member of the Shotgun Players, has recovered and the show will go on. What was going to …Continue reading
