That I Should Stop Searching for Whoever I Was Before: ‘True Mistakes’ by Lena Moses-Schmitt

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The poems of Lena Moses-Schmitt’s new collection, True Mistakes (96 pages; University of Arkansas Press), feature those gaps of perception in which what is obvious or straightforward becomes supplanted by the relentless onslaught of experience. A finalist for the 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the collection traces that which we so often miss or move past in a hurry, and grounds us in a new mode of witness—where, “Like the sun, I can only look at you/when I don’t look.” Moses-Schmitt’s dazzling poems center the importance of carefully wrought introspection in negotiating the distance between writing and living. In its […]

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To Ride Is to Fall, To Live Is to Fall: ‘Riding’ by Pardis Mahdavi

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In 2000, U.S. author Pardis Mahdavi arrives in Tehran, determined to learn about a country she has only heard secondhand and sometimes sensational accounts of—tales of revolution and of the country as it existed during her parents’ emigration. Her scholarly interest in sexual politics and the emerging feminist movement in Iran leads her to cross paths with young women in the country’s underground who are leading a self-described “sexual revolution” in their open exploration of their bodies and intimate desires—a rebellion against the morally coded impositions and restrictions of a regime that has been in power since the Islamic Revolution […]

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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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