Jim Gavin’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Esquire, Slice, The Mississippi Review, and ZYZZYVA. Based in Los Angeles, he is also the creator of the critically-acclaimed television series Lodge 49, now in its second season. You can watch Lodge 49 on AMC every Monday night at 10pm. Issue 116 features a Q&A with Gavin, an excerpt from which appears below: OSCAR VILLALON: As a prose writer, as somebody who conceives of narrative through the written word, how did you go about recalibrating your sense of telling a story for a visual medium? JIM GAVIN: I have a dumb […]
Month: September 2019
ZYZZYVA Interview Series: Meron Hadero
by ZYZZYVA Staff
Meron Hadero is an Ethiopian-American born in Addis Ababa who came to the U.S. in her childhood via East and West Germany. Her short stories appear in Best American Short Stories, Selected Shorts on NPR/PRI, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, ZYZZYVA, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and other journals. Her writing has also been published in The New York Times Book Review, the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, and others. Her work has been supported by the International Institute at the University of Michigan, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Artist Trust. Hadero has held fellowships at the World […]
‘Hard Mouth’ by Amanda Goldblatt: What Grief Can Do
by Zack Ravas
When Denny, the twenty-something narrator of Amanda Goldblatt’s first novel, Hard Mouth (242 pages; Counterpoint Press), flees Washington, D.C., for a mountain cabin to avoid witnessing her father’s final cancer-ridden days, the reader hesitates to judge; after all, who’s to say we wouldn’t do the same in Denny’s place? We all grieve in our distinct ways, and in that regard Denny’s choice seems as sound as her father’s to reject treatment for his third round of cancer. After ten years of watching her father slowly decline, she realizes, “I needed an out…I did not yet understand that courage was unrequired […]
‘Love and I’ by Fanny Howe: A Meander through a Singular Mind
by Sophia Stewart
Fanny Howe prefers to be alone—perhaps that’s what makes her such a perceptive poet. In her latest collection, Love and I (80 pages; Graywolf Press), the fruits of Howe’s solitude are on full display. Howe is introspective, curious, and content when she is by herself. Many of the poems in Love and I celebrate the comforts of being alone: I’ll sit at the window Where it’s safe to say no. Won’t go out, won’t work For a living, will study the clouds Becoming snow. That’s not to say Howe doesn’t grapple with the aches of loneliness as well: “Someone help […]
Q&A with Cristina García: ‘Here in Berlin’ and Writing in Cuban
by Jesus Francisco Sierra
Fidel died three years ago. Obama is no longer President. Their absence from the American political landscape and Trump’s divisive posturing has given rise to the old Cold War rhetoric between Washington and Havana, bringing into question where U.S.-Cuba relations might be headed. These tensions challenge us to inquire where the literary response may be for those writers who live in the hyphen between “Cuban” and “American.” A telling answer can be found in Cristina Garcia’s arresting fiction. Over the last twenty years her work has steadily moved away from Cuba-centric fiction to explorations going beyond the political and sentimental […]
Q&A with Brandon Shimoda: ‘The Grave on the Wall’ and Writing with Ghosts
by Scout Turkel
How to capture a life, how to represent it, is a difficult if necessary question to address in writing. Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall (222 pages; City Lights Books) relentlessly contends with this concern as it recounts the story of Midori Shimoda, the author’s grandfather, within the entangled histories of immigration, Japanese incarceration during World War II, mourning, and memory. The book is also an examination of writing itself, the mechanism available for, and sometimes burdened with, conveying these stories; with relaying and reimagining them, opening them to visitation. A chronicle of the living and the dead and the places […]
ZYZZYVA Interview Series: Peter Orner
by Oscar Villalon
Chicago-born Peter Orner is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Peter is the author of two novels published by Little, Brown: The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (2006) and Love and Shame and Love (2010), and two story collections also published by Little, Brown: Esther Stories (2001, 2013 with new foreword by Marilynne Robinson) and Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge (2013). His essay collection/memoir, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Reading to Live and Living to Read (Catapult, 2016) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into French, […]
Q&A with Susan Steinberg: ‘Machine’ and an Automatic Tension
by Zack Ravas
You can accuse the narrator of Susan Steinberg’s Machine (149 pages; Graywolf) of many things, but failing to hold the reader’s attention isn’t one of them. Steinberg’s first novel after a series of story collections, Machine chronicles a dread-filled summer on a nameless shore following the suspicious drowning of a teenage girl. Our narrator, a former friend of the deceased, grapples with guilt, teenage boredom, and her own privileged family’s struggles. “This is a story about desperation,” she states, “you could also say acceleration; but in this story, they’re the same.” The novel unfolds in haunting and poetic style, with […]