Finding Voice to Give Voice: Q&A with Lori Ostlund

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The title of Lori Ostlund’s new story collection, Are You Happy? (272 pages; Astra House), suggests the quandary of whether Ostlund is interrogating the usefulness of the question itself or exploring whether her characters are genuinely happy. A few stories in—with a cast of characters including a girl who is molested by a coach, a loving couple whose son dies, and a woman who discovers a peeping tom—the issue becomes moot. Gauging the happiness of others and ourselves is a social instinct and a practice, and interrogation is a constant part of that process. Within her stories, Ostlund captures how […]

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The Architecture of Memory: ‘Poet in the Neighborhood: Selected Poems of Rafael Alcides’

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A momentous collection of poems about struggle and resistance, Rafael Alcides’s Poet in the Neighborhood (190 pages; Asterism), translated and selected by Pablo Medina, traces the solitude of voluntary internal exile by a Cuban poet who traverses his mother’s tragedies, bawdy humor, and prayerful conversation. (A few of the poems in the collection were published in ZYZZYVA Issue 127.) No stranger to myth, Alcides likens his mother to “a girl filled with illusion,” “laden with memories like Sinbad”, comparing her to La Gioconda and a Shakespearean tragedy as he mythologizes her history as a young woman in Havana. His own […]

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The Sorrow and the Fury: ‘Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece’ by Nasser Rabah

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“And I’m delirious: Gaza… Gaza,” Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah writes, the echo of grief shadowing the speaker’s cries. Written as he endured the genocidal assault, Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece (192 pages; City Lights Books) resounds with gripping humanity, as his poems of love, the dead, and an accompanying fierce valuation of life evoke realities that often evade propaganda and the mass media. Rabah’s first collection in translation is a bilingual edition translated by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, and Khaled Al-Hilli, and offers a powerful introduction to his lyrical work in English. The poet’s language is marked by […]

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Meet Our New Senior Editor: Q&A with Manjula Martin

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Manjula Martin joined ZYZZYVA’s masthead this April as our new Senior Editor. Previous to ZYZZYVA, she was the managing editor of the lauded Zoetrope: All-Story, the literary magazine owned by filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola which won the National Magazine Award for fiction during her tenure. Martin is the coauthor of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, winner of the 2020 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Most recently, she is the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award this year and has been reissued in […]

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At the Edge and Then Past It: ‘Audition’ by Pip Adam

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Pip Adam’s boundless and mythic new novel, Audition (Coffee House Press; 217 pages), begins with three giants trapped on a spaceship, exiled from Earth. As they hurtle through space, Alba, Stanley, and Drew speak to each other; if they stop talking, their bodies will resume growing larger and, eventually, break open the ship. This opening section, consisting entirely of dialogue, is disoriented and disorienting. The trio struggles to describe their situation. “Are you getting bigger?” they ask each other. “Were we quiet and time has passed?” They can recall being in a classroom before being put on the spaceship Audition, […]

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Choosing Each Other: Q&A with Jemimah Wei

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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 […]

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Wall of Glass: Q&A with Matthew Specktor

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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 […]

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The Mystery of the Caves: ‘Our Beautiful Boys’ by Sameer Pandya

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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 […]

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Optimizing Doesn’t Equal Thriving: Q&A with Alex Higley

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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 […]

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Yearning at Its Highest Levels: Q&A with Iheoma Nwachukwu

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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 […]

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Living to Just Work: ‘Make Your Own Job’ by Erik Baker

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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 […]

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