Our New T-Shirts & Totes

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Celebrate ZYZZYVA while looking stylish, too! The cream T-shirt comes in all sizes, features a ribbed neck, and is made from 100 percent USA cotton. Manufactured by Los Angeles Apparel, with the design printed by San Francisco’s Babylon Burning, this T-shirt is about as California as it gets. Order here. People have loved our red-and-blue totes, but now you have your choice of two color schemes to choose from. Our new offering is a black canvas tote with cream lettering—at once bold and elegant. Order here. And if you’d like to get either of these items along with a subscription, […]

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The Multitudes of the Family Restaurant: Q&A with Curtis Chin

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Curtis Chin is the author of the memoir Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant. (Little Brown). A co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City, Chin served as the nonprofit’s first executive director. He has received awards from ABC/Disney Television, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he has made two documentaries, Tested and Dear Corky, the latter of which premiered on “American Masters” on PBS.Chin and I zoomed about his memoir and about his formative years spent in Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, his family’s restaurant in […]

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The Era of Prohibition as Feminist History: Q&A with Gioia Diliberto

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Gioia Diliberto’s new work of nonfiction, Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition (336 pages; University of Chicago Press), is an immersive and meticulously researched examination of the forces behind the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which went into effect in 1920, and the contentious, years-long struggle that led to its repeal in 1933. The four women mentioned in Firebrands’ subtitle were key figures in Prohibition’s passage and its eventual repeal: Ella Boole, who led the Women’s Christian Temperance Union for many years; Mabel Walker Willebrandt, assistant U.S. Attorney General, who was responsible for […]

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The Boy Is a Time Bomb: ‘Saint the Terrifying’ by Joshua Mohr

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I live a quiet life. Wife, family, gym membership—the whole catastrophe. But Joshua Mohr’s latest, Saint the Terrifying (290 pages; The Unnamed Press) offers me—and you, Dear Reader—a day-pass to a world of pain, glory, lust, and limitlessness. It’s a picaresque account of a West Oakland punk rocker on a mission from God (make that Scandinavian deities) to find out who’s been stealing the gear from his starving musician buddies and make them pay for their sins, bigly. At story’s outset, the one-eyed title character is recovering from the death of his alcoholic mother, who had a habit of dancing […]

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‘Bad’ Women: ‘Shame on You’ by Melissa Petro

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“Brown,” as in Brené Brown, is mentioned forty-two times in Melissa Petro’s investigative memoir, Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification (288 pages; Putnam). It’s not surprising. Few people are as connected with studying shame as Brown, whose 2011 TED talk “The power of vulnerability” and subsequent books catalyzed an anti-shame movement. Yet shame, as Petro states, “remains no less pervasive today than it was ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago.”  Seven out of ten teenage girls are ashamed of their bodies; seventy-five percent of executive women feel imposter syndrome; three out of […]

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In the Time of COVID: ‘A Journal of the Plague Years: Words and Music from the Lost Days’

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Capturing the “decisive moment,’’ in Cartier-Bresson’s phrase, has always been a perilous project, made more so in these dizzying times of social media, constant disinformation, and attention spans as fleeting as the latest app or iPhone upgrade. All the more impressive then, when writers, and editors, take the time for a more considered look at once-shattering events that have been too quickly forgotten. Such is the case with A Journal of the Plague Years: Words & Music from the Lost Days (289 pages; Blue Books). A spinoff from an online website offering takes on the immediate and long-term impact of […]

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Beauty

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None of us knew her real name. We heard her mother call her Beauty and she became Beauty for all of us. The day she arrived we were in the yard of Jana’s house, waiting desperately for the rain. Sameer had been hitting the ball all over the large yard, and nothing we did, chucking, distracting, changing the ball, nothing could get him out that afternoon. Our hopes clung to the gray clouds taking over the sky, threatening to wash away everything. And when we saw from a distance a thin-mustached man open the tin gate and a long, beaten-up […]

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What Was Lost Still Remains: ‘There Are Rivers in the Sky’ by Elif Shafak

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How is a goddess erased from history? What can be done to reinstate her? In her stunning new novel, Elif Shafak ponders these questions in reference to Nisaba, the ancient Sumerian goddess of writing. There Are Rivers in the Sky (464 pages; Knopf) is profound and multi-layered, braiding three distinct stories that eventually merge to form the narrative, like tributaries forming a single river. The tale begins with a single raindrop that falls from the sky onto the beard of King Ashurbanipal of Nineveh, who assembled an impressive library that included a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh etched onto […]

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The (Re)Discovery of Peter Carr

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On October 28, an exhibition titled “Peter Carr: Artist for Survival” opened at the Cerritos College Art Gallery in Norwalk, California. The show, which runs through December 13, is “the first comprehensive art historical retrospective of the poet, activist, and fascinating outsider artist,” according to the gallery. The following is by the show’s co-curator and ZYZZYVA contributor Andrew Tonkovich. The editor of the Santa Monica Review, Tonkovich was entrusted with Carr’s archive of “large-scale paintings, frenetic drawings, and homemade political posters, as well as his own personal notebooks, intimate sketches and studies, self-published books, and other biographically-significant ephemera” following Carr’s […]

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The Human Spirit in the Language: Interview with Francisco Goldman

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I met Francisco Goldman in the summer of 2022, outside a cafe in the San Miguel neighborhood of Mexico City, some blocks from the apartment he shares with his wife, their daughter, and his wife’s niece (who lives under their care). Months before, I’d written a review about Goldman’s latest novel, the Pulitzer Prize-finalist Monkey Boy. He was an author whose books I’d loved immoderately for years, an author whose best lines I cherished and could recite word for word, not misplacing even a dash or a comma. I decided to approach the review as if it were a conversation […]

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Pet Project: ‘We’ll Prescribe You a Cat’ by Syou Ishida

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Syou Ishida’s amusing but poignant novel-in-stories, We’ll Prescribe You a Cat (translated by E. Madison Shimoda; 304 pages; Berkley) takes place in the fictional Nakagyō Kokoro Clinic for the Soul in Kyoto. The Japanese clinic’s office on the fifth floor of a building seems to exist in a magical, liminal space, since it doesn’t show up on a phone navigation map or have a numbered street address. Rather, knowledge of the clinic is passed by word of mouth, and the office can be discovered only by those who are truly ready, at that moment, for a cat prescription. Many of […]

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A Gothic Bender: ‘The Empusium’ by Olga Tokarczuk

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Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “in the summer of 1914 the roof of the over-admired European civilization simply fell in.” The conditions that led to the collapse of reason and the death of 16 million people during World War I haunt The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, Olga Tokarczuk’s wry new novel (translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones; 320 pages; Riverhead). Set in the fall of 1913, just months before the start of the First World War, the novel’s protagonist Mieczysław Wojnicz, a young engineer arrives at a “consumption free” mountain resort in Görbersdorf, an Alpine town in Prussian Silesia (now […]

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