My Brain’s Too Tired

by Wanda Coleman

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Mrs. Jackson, we’ve sat in silence for over five minutes. Perhaps you need additional time to gather your thoughts. Would you like to continue our session or should we reschedule?Continue. I’m sorry I stopped talkin’. But the mere thought of what I have to say exhausts me. It’s so heavy, Dr. Flowers. It’s as if

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In This Annihilated Place

by Wanda Coleman

Posted on by Zack Ravas
ZYZZYVA Volume 28, #1, Spring 2012

“Cast ’em out! For he deceives us all!”Some call him Preach, others call him Crazy John. We’ve called him out of his Christian name so much we’ve forgotten it. Most of us snigger at his ranting, sometimes to his face, daring the retort if he’s bold enough to make one. At those moments, he tightens

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Ini Y Fati

by Carribean Fragoza

Posted on by Zack Ravas

You would think that such an event, a bolt of lightning shooting out of the sky to strike a little girl in a vacant lot, would call immediate attention from the neighbors. But it did not. Only the dogs pointed their snouts to the sky and howled. Birds were startled into flight from their power

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‘Missionaries’ by Phil Klay: The Cost of Indifference

by David Emmanuel

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In an era of globalized conflict and widespread disinformation, all of which help fuel conspiracy theories and increasingly violent online factions, the world stage can appear given over to chaos. It is for precisely these reasons that Phil Klay’s most recent novel, Missionaries (404 pages; Penguin Press), feels so refreshing, as the author draws connections and finds meaning in the disorder. The plot largely takes place in Colombia and centers around the various factions (paramilitary groups, guerilla fighters, the Colombian government, and U.S forces) that strive to steer the country in the direction that best suits their own interests. Though […]

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‘Fragments from a Found Notebook’ by Mihail Sebastian: A Question of Identity

by Lily Nilipour

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In 1934, anti-Semitic laws in Romania banned author, journalist, and critic Mihail Sebastian from continuing any of his writing or teaching work. He was in his twenties then, and he no longer had printing or publishing rights under his own name. Yet this did not stop the young writer from a prolific career before his untimely death in 1945. His most famous and important work—Journal, 1935-1944: The Fascist Years—is a chronicle of his own life during that period and the increasing persecution he faced as a Jewish man in Romania. Sebastian’s first book, Fragments from a Found Notebook (78 pages; […]

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ZYZZYVA Staff Recommends January 2021: What to Read, Watch, & Listen to

by ZYZZYVA Staff

Posted on by Zack Ravas

A new year means new media! So let’s leave 2020 in the rearview and look ahead to this year’s round of books to read, films to watch, and other content to enjoy. With that in mind, we present January’s round of Staff Recommends: Lily Nilipour, Intern: For me, reading Andre Breton’s work always feels like living in a dream. Such is the space he and his co-author Philippe Soupault create in The Magnetic Fields, newly translated into English by Charlotte Mandell. People, sounds, and objects float murkily by, a bit languidly, but are then gone in a moment. Like the […]

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Q&A with Nina Revoyr: Looking back on ‘Postcard from L.A., April’

by Corinne Leong

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Our recent Los Angeles Issue (No. 119) featured an essay by novelist Nina Revoyr titled “Postcard from L.A., April,” a meditation on mortality, privilege, and mindfulness during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In it, Revoyr reflects on her past encounters with illness and other threats to life—severe lung damage following chemical exposure, a cancer scare, plummeting sixty feet down the face of Mt. Shasta—in order to contextualize her experiences of the pandemic as they occurred in April 2020 in Los Angeles. Having intimately faced her mortality, Revoyr recognizes certain comforts that accompany L.A.’s stay-at-home orders. While she acknowledges […]

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Of Girls and Golems: An Interview with Riva Lehrer

by Christine Sneed

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Artist, activist, writer, and professor Riva Lehrer’s debut memoir, Golem Girl (448 pages; One World), is a book defined by its author’s witty and confiding voice and the numerous paintings and photographs populating its pages. It is at once a work of serious literature and an artist’s book: a beautifully produced physical object. And it was recently named as one of the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards in Autobiography.   Lehrer, born with spina bifida in Cincinnati in 1958, spent the first two years of her life in the hospital and would have been forced to stay […]

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Silver Lake Letter

by Glen David Gold

Posted on by Zack Ravas

I live in Silver Lake, a part of Los Angeles that has been adjacent to working movie studios since Hollywood began. My house is on a parcel that was originally a farm that was failing until the owner learned he could rent his sway-back horse to Mack Sennett as a day player. The 1920s Spanish-style houses and the 1960s Neutra specimens were built for contract players, middle-class actors. What I mean to say is that the people here have always been hot. It’s sort of what we’re known for. I use that “we” as a recent immigrant, and to be […]

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L.A. Letter #2

by Various

Posted on by Zack Ravas

I hear footfalls pounding outside and turn to look out my office window and see a young man in a reflective yellow vest, carrying a sizable box, running down the sidewalk in front of my house. He’s masked and disappears from my view and seconds later I hear him knocking on the front door. Three quick raps. Then he’s sprinting in the opposite direction, at a speed that tells me he’s behind his quota—or wants to get ahead of it—although it’s early morning, the sky is still overcast, the sun has yet to burn off the haze. It’s not even […]

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L.A. Letter #1

by Various

Posted on by Zack Ravas

My father who had a stroke about twelve years ago, lives in a facility right near the beach on PCH (the Pacific Coast Highway), although I’m not sure he knows he lives so close to the beach. I think that if he knew, he would be very excited because he loves the ocean. This facility, like many of the senior facilities across the nation, has been struggling all year to battle COVID. Interestingly, it’s served as a kind of barometer, a proxy of sorts for the COVID spread in the area. With each new surge in the area, I receive […]

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‘Ordesa’ by Manuel Vilas: An Assertion of Goodness

by Corinne Leong

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Literature is subjective: on this, most can agree. A novel provides a snapshot of the author’s world, a distillation of their values and beliefs. But sometimes there arises a snapshot so striking and definitive it resembles the universal. Manuel Vilas’ Ordesa (304 pages; Riverhead Books; translated by Andrea Rosenberg) is one such novel. In its unflinching exploration of parental loss, mortality, and solitary life through the eyes of a 52-year-old, recently bereaved divorcé, Ordesa offers a perspective so earnest it approaches unquestionable truth. Vilas’ novel is structured around its unnamed narrator’s reflections on his current, abysmal state of affairs, as well […]

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