Year: 2022

My Ancestors Send Me Screenshots

by Tayi Tibble

Posted on by Zack Ravas

My ancestors send me screenshots of your group chats dissecting me with all the science of your founding fathers and the sympathy of your murdering mothers wanting to know who I am where I’ve been and who I’ve been with. What the fuck is a whakapapa? Do I carry it in my pussy? In a tiny baggy? Like a real 1? Like a down-ass bitch? Do I have a heart? And does it bleed? Like a steak? If it’s brutalised enough? If it’s served? On a plate? With proper silverware? And presented to your queen still beating would she care? […]

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‘Folk Music – A Bob Dylan Biography In Seven Songs’ by Greil Marcus: The Holy Grail

by Paul Wilner

Posted on by Zack Ravas

“So this is a book of cigarette butts,’’ Greil Marcus writes, without apology, in Folk Music – A Bob Dylan Biography In Seven Songs (Yale University Press; 288 pages), his latest attempt to interweave the complicated legacy of the Nobel Prize-winning hobo from Hibbing with Lincoln’s mystic chords of memory, our unresolved racial divide, and the “wild mercury sound’’ emanating from those trying to stand their ground in an invisible republic far outside the white noise of hot takes and cold comfort. He’s referring, of course, to the unaccountable adulation Dylan (still) draws from armies of obsessed fans, quoting from […]

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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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ZYZZYVA Holiday Gift Guide

by ZYZZYVA

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Dear Friend,  It’s that time of year! The holidays are upon us and, with them, the pressure to procure the right gift for our loved ones. We’d like to offer our assistance to those desiring to shop small, shop local, and shop mindfully. With this in mind, here is a helpful list of gift suggestions that might just fit the bill. And we wish you and yours a wonderful holiday season and happy new year. Yours, the ZYZZYVA team For the Poet: Even us ardent fans of fiction have a friend or family member who is most moved by poetry and […]

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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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‘The Night Shift’ by Natalka Burian: Vibrant Vulnerability

by Megan Luebberman

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In author Natalka Burian’s new novel, the exciting and thought-provoking The Night Shift (325 pages; Park Row Books), otherworldly openings called “Shortcuts” allow individuals to teleport through time and space from one location to another. Only certain characters are in-the-know, while others, like Jean Smith, have no idea that it’s possible at all. Jean, a woman struggling just to pay her rent in New York City, has to pick up jobs at a bar and at a bakery.  She soon feels there aren’t enough hours in the day until a newfound acquaintances introduces her to New York’s Shortcuts. Jean is […]

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Wedding Favors

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Liana turned the radio up and signed into the Lyft app. Some  drivers kept the music flat, classical or Top 40, out of respect  for the passengers’ preferences, but this was her car, goddamnit,  and she played whatever she woke up feeling: Big KRIT got her out the  bed most Mondays, Ms. Aretha Franklin three weeks straight after her last birthday, and now, she was on that Dwayne Carter: You had a lot of crooks  Trying to steal your heart  Never really had luck  Couldn’t never figure out how to love  She felt that shit.  Liana wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t surprised […]

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Obverse

by Yuri Herrera

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Translated by Lisa DillmanAnd that was why they decided to go off and explore the other side, on which, they hoped, there would be no watery cliffs or dragons awaiting them at the end.They traversed iotas and iotas. Deserts of iotas and dales of iotas and mountains of iotas. Millions of iotas. Until, finally, once

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Flat Map

by Yuri Herrera

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Translated by Lisa DillmanPerhaps they could have saved the lives of all those who died chasing the truth to the ends of the earth if they’d thought more about, say, the thickness of trees. But these people, like all people, felt compelled to see things with their own eyes, which would later be eaten by

Subscribers only: to access this content, you must be a member of ZYZZYVA Studio. Membership is included with any subscription. Subscribe today, or if you are already a subscriber, log in to continue reading. (Read our FAQ for more details, and contact us if you have any trouble logging in.)

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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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