Enter Harlow

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Karen Joy Fowler is the prize-winning author of many books, including the novels Sister Noon, Wit’s End, and the best-seller The Jane Austen Book Club. Her most recent book is the story collection What I Didn’t See (Small Beer Press).

“Enter Harlow,” her new fiction in ZYZZYVA‘s Winter issue, is further testament to what Michael Chabon has said about her work: “No contemporary writer creates characters more appealing, or examines them with greater acuity and forgiveness, than she does.” Set at UC Davis during the ’90s, the story, which comes from the opening pages of a novel-in-progress, follows a young woman “meandering” through her fourth year of school. “Enter Harlow” tells how that meandering is suddenly, spectacularly interrupted — in the school cafeteria. The following is an excerpt from the story.

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Get Lost

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Faith Gardner is a writer and musician living in Oakland. She plays guitar and sings in the bands Hooray for Everything and Dark Beach, and performs solo as Scarlett O’Hara. Her writing has appeared in PANK, Word Riot, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and many other places.

“Get Lost” appears in the Winter 2011 issue of ZYZZYVA. About a young woman who is suddenly without her best friend, who moved with her to San Francisco, Gardner’s story is appealingly downbeat, somewhat sinister, and surprisingly humorous as it follows a person gone adrift in an unfamiliar city and looking everywhere for her bearings. The following is an excerpt from the story.

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The Twelve Friends of Rodolfo and Mimi

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My husband settles back on the couch with his coffee. “I’ve been indulging this bizarre, wacko fantasy,” he says. Oh, dear. He’ll want to fly to his hometown’s soccer field for Christmas. (Blackburn, Lancashire: identification with the home team is tribal.) Or start ballroom dancing lessons. Rip out the grass and plant cactus in the yard. Kayak the Nile. It’s the first day of November’s last week. He takes twenty minutes to “thaw out” in the morning, as my dad used to term it, before hopping on his bicycle to go to work. I am doing yogic stretches on the […]

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Appealing More and More to the Ear: Literature and Audio Books

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Dear reader, I did not intend to get the audio book. When I walked into the Berkeley Public Library a few months ago, looking for a copy of Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library, I don’t think I had intentions toward any particular format. If pressed at the time to reveal my implicit biases, I would probably have said I was looking for a physical, bound paper-and-cloth book, a book-book. (For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to such objects as “books”). Unfortunately, The Swimming Pool Library and The Line of Beauty—Hollinghurst’s Booker prize-winning fourth novel—were both […]

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A Fortunate Literary Community in L.A.: Wendy C. Ortiz and Rhapsodomancy

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In Los Angeles, a person can’t get anywhere in seven minutes. There’s no Muni, BART, quaint Italian streetcar or the tried and true 22 Fillmore. Attending readings can be a chore that involves multiple freeway changes and nail biting, bumper-to-bumper traffic. It’s difficult to lure people out for free drinks, a cheese plate, and a discounted literary journal here, where an iffy parking situation can make or break an event. In L.A., I show up to readings because I value the time spent crafting a story, the twenty-four revisions and the manic rehearsals that go into a reading. I know […]

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Summoning the Achingly Beautiful Out of Strife: Craig Thompson’s ‘Habibi’

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There are some artists and writers that truly utilize the medium of comic books and graphic novels to create a unique narrative experience that only sequential art can deliver. Craig Thompson is one of those individuals. Following the success of his semi-autobiographical Blankets, Thompson has once again given readers a poignant and sincere tale of love and spirituality in Habibi (Pantheon; 672 pages). Set in a world that is both historical and modern, mixing epic deserts and extravagant palaces with modern city landscapes and industrial wastelands, readers follow Dodola and Zam, two children who escape from slavery by fleeing to […]

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The Wear and Tear of a Boy’s Life: Roy Jacobsen’s ‘Child Wonder’

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Roy Jacobsen’s coming-of-age novel, Child Wonder (Graywolf Press; 239 pages), offers a well-crafted metaphor for the cultural transformations of Norway in the 1960s – a time “[b]efore oil,” as Jacobsen writes in the foreword, “before anyone had any money at all.” The book, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, is also a romance of youth, filled with nostalgia and secrets, rage and violence. And, of course, transformations. Suddenly, for Finn, the story’s narrator and hero, things become “brighter,” eyes become “bluer.” Though he is an emotionally rich, thoughtful and observant character, Finn still acts out like […]

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Both Outside and Inside the Literary World: Q&A with Dagoberto Gilb

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Dagoberto Gilb is arguably the most critically acclaimed Mexican American author writing today, with a publication resume few writers of any background can claim: The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, Harper’s, Texas Monthly, The New York Times, The Nation. The author of six books, he won a PEN/Hemingway Award for his first story collection The Magic of Blood (1993), which was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner. His first novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna (1995), was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, and his second novel, The Flowers (2008), was praised by […]

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Luis Alberto Urrea and the Power of a Captivating Reading

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Luis Alberto Urrea is an amazing writer. The beloved, multi-prize winning author of novels, nonfiction, and poetry, Urrea’s most recent book, Queen of America, is (as I wrote in a review that appeared in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle) “at once magical and corporeal, grounding and transporting. … The compelling true story of a young woman caught between worlds, between her childhood in Mexico and her adulthood in the United States, between the spiritual world and the material world.” But here I want to discuss Urrea’s reading, his ability to transfix an audience through the spoken word. The first time I […]

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In the Winter Issue

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Picking up where we left off with our Fall issue (No. 92), the newest issue of ZYZZYVA is packed with 200 pages of great writing and visual art from the best of West Coast writers and artists. Here’s what’s inside: Fiction from Karen Joy Fowler (on a righteous break up at a UC Davis dining hall), Adam Johnson (on the Greatest North Korean Story of All Time!), and Herbert Gold (on a Stanford golden girl gone bad) A one-act play by Barry Gifford on Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn and a couple of Yankees players on the finca in Cuba Verse […]

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The Slippery Nature of Nonfiction: Q&A with Jackie Bang

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Jackie Bang’s story “Silver Mailbox,” which appears in the Winter 2011 issue of ZYZZYVA, is either a heavily fictionalized piece of nonfiction or a heavily factual piece of fiction. Or perhaps something else. The story of a Washington couple — the Miner and the Collector — and the recently-arrived infants brought into their brood, it’s a stylized piece of writing that leaves you eager to learn of the fates of these strange but compelling people. We talked to Jackie Bang via email about her story and the larger work of hers from which it’s taken. ZYZZYVA: “Silver Mailbox” is the […]

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The Three Sisters

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Christopher Warden’s story, which ran in the Fall 1989 issue of ZYZZYVA, is perceived in a childlike imagination, where the violent reality of adulthood is rejected in favor of dream, where physical boundaries are first explored and adult consequences (mortality, discipline) seem like the afterlife. “The Three Sisters” is about a nine-year-old boy, a sort of Peter Pan figure, visiting in the night three young sisters who take form with specific folk-like characteristics (enchanted hair, teeth that talk — not to mention the jealously among them). The storytelling here, brief and openhearted, conceives the real world as if in a dream: every object carries the possibility of intensity and drama: “He walked out into the water. There were sandbars going out a long way. The boy pretended they were islands, and he walked from island to island looking for the three sisters.”

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