Blog – Page 30 of 117

The Golden State Bundle, Now Available

by ZYZZYVA

April 6, 2021

Posted on April 6, 2021 (August 17, 2021) by Zack Ravas

ZYZZYVA Golden State Bundle: No. 117 & No. 119

Within the realm of literature, there is no need to choose one region over the other. Get the Bay Area Issue and the Los Angeles Issue in our Golden State Bundle and enjoy the work of some of the best poets and writers that California has to offer. Together, the issues in the Golden State Bundle boast many of the West Coast’s finest writers, with fiction by Charlie Jane Anders, Jonathan Escoffery, Rita Bullwinkel, Michelle Latiolais, Chia-Chia Lin, Perry Janes, Ingrid Rojas Contreras; essays by Tom Bissell, Lydia Kiesling, and Wendy C. Ortiz; poetry by sam sax, Victoria Chang, Meg […]

Three Windows Onto Rome

by Kirstin Valdez Quade

Posted on April 6, 2021 (April 5, 2021) by Zack Ravas

Santi Quattro CoronotiOn the right wall of the basilica is a fragment of a fresco of San Bartolomeo. He’s a bearded old man, mouth obscured by damage, his eyes suspicious. His own wrinkled pelt is thrown over his shoulder like a traveling cloak.No longer the cheerful dandy, dressed in white with swinging purple tassels. (He

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Q&A with Christine Hume: ‘Saturation Project’ and Resisting the Myth

by Lily Nilipour

April 5, 2021

Posted on April 5, 2021 (April 2, 2021) by Zack Ravas

Christine Hume’s Saturation Project (192 pages; Solid Objects) is a boldly ambitious piece of experimental nonfiction that defies easy categorization. The book is split into three parts, and in each one we witness the story of a life, and hear the sounds that underlie it, whether it’s the “hum” that grants its name to the middle section of the book or the wind that commands much of Hume’s attention in the third section. Whatever this current might be, it rushes beneath her words like subterranean rivers moving undetected until they either emerge gradually from the depths. Hume spoke with ZYZZYVA […]

‘How Beautiful We Were’ by Imbolo Mbue: A Vast Landscape

by Owen Torrey

April 2, 2021

Posted on April 2, 2021 (April 1, 2021) by Zack Ravas

In one telling, the story might begin here: the children started getting sick, and nobody knew why. At first, two died within a month. Before long, several more got feverish, then stopped being able to speak, and, soon after, to breathe. Surely, it was said, there must be a common cause. But what was shared between these children? Only the irreducible things: the ground they walked over, the air they breathed, the water they drew from the village well—right where the pipelines ran. When Imbolo Mbue’s second novel How Beautiful We Were (364 pages; Random House) begins, these things have […]

ZYZZYVA Staff Recommends March 2021: What to Read & Listen To

by ZYZZYVA Staff

March 31, 2021

Posted on March 31, 2021 (March 31, 2021) by Zack Ravas

Lily Nilipour, Intern: Throughout the sustained isolation of this pandemic, we have learned much about our personal relationships to each other—to those close to us, to our groups and communities, and to society at large. It has been a time of great tragedy, on many fronts, but we have also seen people come together in extraordinary ways. In searching for ways to process the events of the past year, I have found myself turning to Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being for some wisdom. For the Time Being is a profound study of a paradox: the importance we place on […]

Slow Street Art

by Dominica Phetteplace

March 29, 2021

Posted on March 29, 2021 (March 30, 2021) by Zack Ravas

Stand on 24th Street and look north, uphill toward Sanchez Street, and you’ll see a bright orange landscape. Artist Amos Goldbaum has designed a mural that stretches from one end of the block toward the other—painted directly on the asphalt. I was enchanted with this work from the moment I first saw drone pictures of it on Instagram. Only a robot can give you the whole picture in one take: a superlong Victorian framed on one side by a riot of tiny houses that resolve as you travel uphill into a Twin Peaks, a lone palm, and then finally, Sutro […]

8 Things You Can Do To Support the AAPIs in Your Life

by Mimi Lok

March 26, 2021

Posted on March 26, 2021 (March 26, 2021) by Zack Ravas

The following is a reprint of a Google Doc by author Mimi Lok. You can read the original document here. In the week since the Atlanta shootings, which claimed the lives of eight people—six of whom were AAPI (Asian American & Pacific Islander) women—I’ve seen my own experience reflected in the AAPIs around me in heartbreaking and illuminating ways. What has emerged most clearly are the layers upon layers of pain—the grief and anger for the victims and their loved ones, the fear for our own loved ones and for ourselves, and the added hurt of invisibility and silence within […]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: The Latin America Notebooks

by Mauro Aprile Zanetti

March 24, 2021

Posted on March 24, 2021 (March 23, 2021) by Zack Ravas

“He traveled a lot and he traveled light. He always carried a raggedy Pan Am bag about the size of a large toaster, in which he packed a change of underwear and an old navy tie in the unwanted event that a tie might be required somewhere, and he didn’t want to embarrass his host. And he always carried small notebooks, which he filled with images, poems, political observations, character sketches.” These are Nancy J. Peters’s words portraying her business partner and lifelong friend, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Her tribute to San Francisco’s first Poet Laureate was paid on the occasion of […]

A Curse on Chavez Ravine

by Lou Mathews

March 23, 2021

Posted on March 23, 2021 (March 22, 2021) by Zack Ravas

I’m reading in the newspaper today and I see that Peter O’Malley wants to build a new football stadium, next to Dodger Stadium. Some of the neighbors are upset. ¡Que surprise! Some of them have been upset since the first O’Malley built the first stadium.That one was Walter. A big, smart, mean Irishman from Brooklyn.

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Pen Pals of the Pandemic, Unite!

by May-lee Chai

March 18, 2021

Posted on March 18, 2021 (March 18, 2021) by Zack Ravas

My father at nearly 90 years of age can no longer safely live on his own so he has moved in with me, into my apartment in San Francisco. We’ve sold his home, auctioned off the lifetime accumulation of his possessions, boxed his books, stacked the remnants in storage. Then the pandemic hits and we can’t go to movies or museums or anything to break the tedium of being confined together in my small, studio apartment. Sartre thought he was being clever but not literal when he wrote No Exit, putting three narcissists in Hell made up of a single […]

The Ever-Evolving Condition of Emigrating: Q&A with ‘Infinite Country’ Author Patricia Engel

by Oscar Villalon

March 17, 2021

Posted on March 17, 2021 (March 16, 2021) by Zack Ravas

In Patricia Engel’s new novel, Infinite Country (208 pages; Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), the acclaimed author of Vida and The Veins of the Ocean explores a desolating aspect of the immigrant experience in the United States: the bifurcation of the heart, split between yearning for a better future and longing for the towns and cities left behind. As her protagonists contend with an immigration status that leaves them terribly vulnerable, and leads to a dreadful family separation—far from each other and from the places they still think of as home—the weight of loss is ever felt. It’s an emotion […]

Ramiro

by Patricia Engel

March 16, 2021

Posted on March 16, 2021 (March 15, 2021) by Zack Ravas

Ramiro will tell you himself he was just another slum kid from El Cartucho. He lived in a one-room apartment with his mother and another family of seven who let them take up a corner. They’d come from Pereira with Ramiro’s father when Ramiro was just beginning to walk, but his father got stabbed beneath

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