Fiction Nonfiction Poetry In Conversation Art […]
Issue No. 129
by ZYZZYVA Staff
Choosing Each Other: Q&A with Jemimah Wei
by Yohanca Delgado
When Jemimah Wei and I met as Stegner Fellows in fiction at Stanford in 2023, we became instant friends. And during our time there, I got to workshop what would become her first novel, The Original Daughter (368 pages; Doubleday), a story about betrayal and complicated relationships that won my heart from the start. There’s something magical about watching what was once a Word document become a beautiful, finished book. (The novel’s official publication date is today!) Part coming of age, part coming apart, this book, set in Singapore, charts the course of two unforgettable characters, Gen and Arin, from […]
Wall of Glass: Q&A with Matthew Specktor
by Christine Sneed
Since the 1970s, when blockbusters such as Jaws and Star Wars began earning astronomical sums at the box office, the future prospects of the movies have been murky. More recently, accelerated by the global COVID lockdown that began in March 2020, the communal experience of movie-viewing in cineplexes has severely declined. Add to this the rise of streaming platforms such as Netflix and Max, and it isn’t difficult to imagine a future when seeing a new film in your local cinema will be considered as quaint as bowling in an alley with hand-set pins. In novelist and cultural critic Matthew […]
The Mystery of the Caves: ‘Our Beautiful Boys’ by Sameer Pandya
by Michelle Latiolais
What happened on Friday night? There was a high-school football game, of course; it is America, and our beautiful boys played like young gods! Then they gathered themselves, the quarterback and two running backs, and they went for Indian food, and then to a party with about a hundred other kids, a party within the ruins of a house set off the road and near three caves. Another story is in the making, an older story, an older question: What happened in the cave? How did Stanley Kincaid, a troublemaker par excellence, get beat to a pulp and skewered hundreds […]
Optimizing Doesn’t Equal Thriving: Q&A with Alex Higley
by Christine Sneed
It can be disorienting to read a novel as good as True Failure (Coffee House Press; 280 pages) is when its bold title archly gestures toward the opposite possibility. Readers of Alex Higley’s third book will instead encounter the work of a writer coming into his full powers as a skilled ironist and cultural critic. True Failure is a moving, fresh, and very funny story about a cast of characters whose quotidian lives and aspirations will seem at once familiar and strange in highly inventive and memorable ways. (Think John Gardner and his dictum that all good fiction has an […]
Yearning at Its Highest Levels: Q&A with Iheoma Nwachukwu
by Hugh Sheehy
The first time I read Iheoma Nwachukwu’s story collection Japa & Other Stories (168 pages; University of Georgia Press), I was staying in a small Airbnb near the Mexico border while my wife volunteered as an interpreter for human rights lawyers interviewing detainees at two nearby detention centers. Each night when she returned, she talked for hours about the people they had interviewed and how odd it was to see these centers filled with people from around the world, who had all somehow made their way through Mexico. So, of course, it seemed like a strange serendipity that of the […]
Living to Just Work: ‘Make Your Own Job’ by Erik Baker
by Christian Baba
You’re tired. Perhaps you’re on your feet all day, or sit in a car for most of the night. Maybe you wake up to unread emails. You polish that resume, prep that interview, hold out hope. You clock in, you invoice, you bill the hour. You cannot shake that sinking feeling that you are not quite where you need to be. That your time, already limited, is misspent. That you could be, should be, doing more. You are not alone. Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (337 pages; Harvard University Press) arrives amid […]
Dreaming Metapluralism: Jonathon Keats’s “The Future Democracies Laboratory”
by Andrew David King
As soon as it seemed on the night and early morning of November 5th and 6th that Donald J. Trump was on track to win the presidency, postmortems of the Democrats’ failure began to pop up like so many fungi. (Some were even written in advance of the election.) Varieties of optimism, from the cautious to the overconfident, disintegrated into hypotheticals and cases. Once the outcome was known—the recent past fixed—it became fair game for meddling. The dice had rolled to a stop; the gears of retroactive prophecy began to turn. The Future Democracies Laboratory, a project by artist and […]
Our New T-Shirts & Totes
by ZYZZYVA Staff
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, […]
The Multitudes of the Family Restaurant: Q&A with Curtis Chin
by Evelyn Ch'ien
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 […]
The Era of Prohibition as Feminist History: Q&A with Gioia Diliberto
by Christine Sneed
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 […]
The Boy Is a Time Bomb: ‘Saint the Terrifying’ by Joshua Mohr
by Paul Wilner
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 […]