Year: 2021

Community Plot

by Bryan Washington

Posted on by Zack Ravas

I’d started tending the ex’s plot. The lettuce and the garlic and the turnips. It wasn’t my idea, the apartment complex had a community garden, and of course I’d seen you out there but we didn’t have shit to say to each other. We met on the stairs after my guy left, and it was another few weeks before we spoke. I’d seen you around, though. Sometimes I’d catch you staring. Our eyes met, and you’d look away. You were an old man, living alone, always in the same greasy cardigan and the same burnt brown shoes, which was everything […]

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ZYZZYVA Staff Recommends December 2021: Best of the Year

by ZYZZYVA Staff

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Shelby Hinte, Intern: Favorite Book Read in 2021 That Was Published in 2021—Her Lesser Work by Elizabeth Ellen (Short Flight/Long Drive) Was it just me or was 2021 a crazy good year for books? No need to name names (as they have already been named enough), but more than one major literary icon published a new novel this year. While many big names were taking up shelf space at the bookstores, I found my favorite book of 2021 in the indie corner: Elizabeth Ellen’s short story collection Her Lesser Work. The twenty stories in this collection are about art, aging, […]

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Friend

by Dominica Phetteplace

Posted on by Zack Ravas

She says Namaste even when not in yoga class, whereas I will not say om under any circumstances. She says she doesn’t resent the younger generation, that they are completely of a world that we made, that to hate the young is to hate ourselves. She says that guys on dating apps indicate their marriage suitability by listing their hobbies as ‘hiking’ and ‘rock climbing.’ Her hobbies include cocaine and gambling, but she leaves those off her profile. Somedays she doesn’t feel like getting out of bed, but if I say I want to get coffee she will walk with […]

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Biodome

by Juhea Kim

Posted on by Zack Ravas

April 13. Almost midnight. Through the worn twill curtains, a viscous light was flowing into the apartment like amber. Park washed his face in the bathroom, took his meds, and sat down on the sofa with the remote. One click, and the blue light of the TV mingled with the sodium yellow of the room. He flipped through the channels. Game shows. Contestants competing for money, for marriage. The women are showing off, swiveling their hips and winking at the camera, and then they’re ranked by the amount of applause they receive. People awwing over tiny puppies. Slow, close-up shots […]

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Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 1—Stephen King

by Sean Gill

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Why? Simple self-promotion? For fun? Sheer ego? “Because no one else can?”         To wrest back the measure of control which a solitary typist enjoys? Is it fear of living merely a life of the mind? The need to act out a fantasy? Or is it a public therapy, an exorcism of demons? Typically an author’s on-screen role in an adaptation is that of a background artist: blink and you’ll miss Kurt Vonnegut (a pedestrian in Mother Night), Amy Tan (a house partier in The Joy Luck Club), Chuck Palahniuk (an airline passenger in Choke), or John le Carré (a […]

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‘Search History’ by Eugene Lim: Rewriting the World After Loss

by Shelby Hinte

Posted on by Zack Ravas

If the art a society chooses to endorse is a measure of who and what it values, then it is also a measure of who and what it denounces. What is art, and who decides, are central questions in Eugene Lim’s latest novel, Search History (208 pages; Coffee House Press). The book is a metafictional examination of art and identity-making that is part action-packed speculative fiction, part autobiography, and part intellectual banter on all things art, race, technology, and death. Search History feels reminiscent of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture and the dialogue-heavy ’90’s films that […]

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Love Story, With Cocaine

by Tom Bissell

Posted on by Zack Ravas
ZYZZYVA Fall 2011 Cover

Maarit’s father had given her a dog because he hoped it would provide her with something to do. It was true that Maarit did not have much to do, though she always felt busy, which was, perhaps, a natural consequence of waking up daily at 3:00 p.m. Most of her activities involved spending her father’s

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Q&A with David Huebert: ‘Chemical Valley’ & Gasoline Rainbows

by Supriya Saxena

Posted on by Zack Ravas

David Huebert’s story collection, Chemical Valley (224 pages; Biblioasis), explores the ways in which humans cope with living in an imperfect and polluted environment. The stories are varied, featuring oil refinery workers, teenage climate activists, long-term care nurses, and more, showing the issues and intricacies of their lives in lush detail. The grim explorations of wealth inequality, illness, and bereavement are counterbalanced by the rich and lyrical prose, providing heartfelt insights into today’s damaged world and the individuals who inhabit it.  Huebert’s writing has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the […]

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‘Harrow’ by Joy Williams: Book of Revelations

by Zack Ravas

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Given the popularity of the genre, chances are good you’ve probably read at least one post-apocalyptic novel by now. But have you ever read a post-apocalyptic novel as conceived by Joy Williams? 2015’s The Visiting Privilege cemented Williams’ reputation as one of our finest short story writers, putting her decidedly off-kilter worldview and rich characterization on display in a compilation of many of her best stories alongside new material. Now the author, who divides her time between Arizona and Wyoming, is back with her first novel in over two decades, following the Pulitzer Prize-finalist The Quick and the Dead. Harrow […]

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‘Night Train’ by A.L. Snijders: Blooming Within Constraints

by Chiara Bercu

Posted on by Zack Ravas

When she began translating contemporary Dutch micro-fiction writer A.L. Snijders’s work, Lydia Davis had only a passing familiarity with the language. Night Train (128 pages; New Directions) presents 91 of Snijders’s more than 3,000 stories, or what he called his zkv’s (zeer korte verhalen: “very short stories”). The collection is a long-tended-to anthology of these writings—“autobiographical mini-fables,” as Davis calls them—whose translations she parsed and reasoned-through using what she knew of German and French, and with the consult of Snijders’s Dutch publisher, Paul Abels. Many of the pieces parallel the tone and form of some of Davis’s own vignettes: stories […]

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Wool

by Mark Labowskie

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Martin exits I-89 before he needs to and progresses town by town. He keeps pulling over to eyeball a fiery spruce or an outcropping of mica, admire quaint inns with ivy wreathed around their VACANCY signs and crumbling breweries offering hard apple cider tastings. He’s eager to reach Tunbridge, but knows anticipation is the greatest pleasure. He stops to buy a mason jar of corn whiskey from a sweet old man on a porch, thinking how happy he’ll be once he reaches Lola and Dot’s barn. Then, realizing his spirits are at that peak where they’re in danger of toppling […]

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ZYZZYVA Staff Recommends November 2021: What to Watch, Read, & Listen To

by ZYZZYVA Staff

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Shelby Hinte, Intern: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment probably doesn’t need me to write a Staff Recommendation in order for it to have continued relevance on the must-read-books-of-all-times list that circulate the internet, but I am going to do it anyway. I originally read Crime and Punishment 15 years ago in my A.P. English class. I am pretty sure this is where most people read the novel. I remember feeling proud of myself for reading, and maybe even somewhat understanding, such a significant novel, but to my memory, I didn’t exactly enjoy it. For years I have relegated it to […]

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