The Winter Issue, Now Available

by ZYZZYVA

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Order your copy of Issue 124 today!* Fiction Presenting Matthew McIntosh’s novella-as-screenplay, “The Christmas Party.” Evoking a bygone era of Hollywood, this cinematic holiday story follows a set of misfits and dreamers on a romantic quest from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Featuring “Cannon,” debut fiction by Allan Martín Nava Sosa. Brittany Bronson’s “The Behavior Chart”: a kindergarten teacher and her severely ill student try to make their way back into each others’ good graces. Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s “The Kyiv Symphony”: “Aeroflot planes have stopped flying overseas, and he suspects that before long the borders will be closed, the Iron Curtain […]

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‘Feast’ by Ina Cariño: Food for Thought

by Gus Berg

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Ina Cariño, the recipient of a 2022 Whiting Award and a 2021 Alice James Award, is a Filipinix American poet whose work draws heavily on intergenerational nourishment and transformation in marginalized communities. Feast (100 pages; Alice James Books), their first book of poetry, is an enriching collection that satisfies a primal hunger for fulfillment while questioning the social conditions that leave people of color deprived. One of the most disarming things about Feast is the bone-deep rawness of this poet’s voice. Even as they veer away from the realm of possibility, the poems feel real because the speaker’s voice remains […]

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‘Novelist as Vocation’ by Haruki Murakami: Persistence as Key

by Danielle Shi

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Novelist as a Vocation (224 pages; Knopf; translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen) is Japanese literary icon Haruki Murakami’s comprehensive look at his expansive and prolific career, a collection of thoughts on the process, substance, and form of novel writing, as well as the habits that make for a successful novelist. The autobiographical essays chart his path as an author over thirty-five years, spanning from his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, to more layered and formally complex works such as Killing Commendatore. As a whole, the pieces provide a glimpse into the mind and career of a man […]

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‘Cinema Speculation’ by Quentin Tarantino: Talking Trash

by Paul Wilner

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Cinema Speculation (400 pages; Harper), billed as Quentin Tarantino’s “first work of nonfiction,” could easily fall into the category of a quickie volume sold on the basis of the Pulp Fiction auteur’s brand value. So it’s a welcome surprise that this book is entertaining, smart, and vivid. Tarantino hasn’t been making the talk-show circuit as much as the pre-streaming old days (for a while, he was a fixture with the now-discredited Charlie Rose), but he brings the same feisty, movie-mad energy to his prose as he did to his early breakthrough films.             Even his book’s title seems like a […]

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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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Remembering Book Editor Pat Holt

by Regan McMahon

Posted on by John McMurtrie

When the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the Bay Area in 1989, Pat Holt remained at her desk, ignoring a co-worker’s urgent plea to take cover—choosing instead to stay on a phone call, making her passionate case to an author or publisher while her office swayed and rattled and books fell off the shelves around her. Such was Pat’s dedication to her work as the former book editor, critic, and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Pat, who devoted her career to her love of books, died December 3 at her home in San Francisco following a brief battle with cancer. […]

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‘Auto/Body’ by Vickie Vértiz: Driving Force

by Gus Berg

Posted on by Zack Ravas

The title of Vickie Vértiz’s latest poetry collection, Auto/Body (90 pages; University of Notre Dame Press), suggests the inner workings of cars, but its focus has to do with the harnessing and distribution of power, personally and societally. Sometimes fueled by rage, sometimes by desire, this power serves as the driving force behind this collection. Vértiz is a Mexican American poet who teaches at UC Santa Barbara. She divides her book, which won the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, into three sections: Alternator, Distributor, and Transmission. The first section sets the tone with its sense of righteous anger. In an […]

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Carrying On: ‘Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors,’ Edited by Grist

by Zoe Binder

Posted on by Zack Ravas

The twelve stories in the anthology Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors (223 pages; The New Press) take readers into the future and across the globe to witness how humanity has persevered in the face of climate-crisis-induced destruction. Across its pages, readers are treated to exhilarating inventiveness, as the various contributors imagine science-fiction concepts like AI pollinators and plastic-eaters, a program that can translate the thoughts and emotions of animals, and suits that allow humans to wield the distinct strengths of insects like spiders and termites. However, the collection doesn’t simply present imagined solutions to climate change. Many of the […]

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‘An Ordinary Life’ by B.H. Fairchild: The Winding Road of Grief

by Gus Berg

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In his latest poetry collection, An Ordinary Life (67 pages; W. W. Norton), B.H. Fairchild, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the author of the collections The Art of the Lathe (1998) and Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2002) , doesn’t flinch from the foxholes remembered secondhand in “My Father, Fighting the Fascists in WWII” or from images of a Korean War veteran bagging canned goods without fingers in “Groceries.” Fairchild offers succinct commentary with discrete but vivid imagery, honoring the beauty of small-town scenes with artistry and exactitude, transforming even a Walmart on […]

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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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Announcing our next Writers’ Workshop: Lori Ostlund on 3rd-Person Close Perspective

by ZYZZYVA

Posted on by Zack Ravas

We’re pleased to announce our next Writers’ Workshop: Lori Ostlund on 3rd-Person Close Perspective. This Zoom-based Writers’ Workshop will take place on April 22nd from 11am to 2pm PST. Purchase your ticket today (and please feel free to spread the word to any of your writer friends!). “I’ve found that often people think that 3rd-close is just a variation on 1st-person, or that widening the distance from the character means that the narrator becomes invisible or neutral, even bland,” says instructor Lori Ostlund, “but I think of 3rd-person close as a way to have the best of both worlds: to […]

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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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Q&A with Tayi Tibble

by Craig Santos Perez

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Tayi Tibble, whose first book of poems, Poūkahangatus, was published by Knopf this year, is an exciting and essential voice of the next generation of Pacific Islander authors. Of indigenous Māori descent, Tibble grew up in Porirua, north of Wellington in Aotearoa (New Zealand), where Poūkahangatus was first published by Victoria University Press in 2018. (Her poetry also appeared in ZYZZYVA No. 123.) The concept of whakapapa—the Māori term for genealogy—is an important part of her collection. More than a simple list of names, whakapapa is a core element of mātauranga Māori, or traditional Māori knowledge. It articulates the living […]

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