Category: Interviews

Interviews with current and past contributors, as well as other writers, poets, and artists

“A book is not interesting to me until it’s impossible for me to write”: Q&A with Robert Glück

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A black and white portrait of the author Robert Glück

A chapter from Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist appeared in the very first issue of ZYZZYVA in 1985. It’s the chapter where Bob, Glück’s avatar and the novel’s narrator, leaves Jack, his lover, in bed and goes to the baths. There, he compares “an orgasm that can be read two ways” to a particular Victorian illusion painting that appears to fluctuate between a woman at a vanity and a skull. We vaguely remember an actual image of said painting from twenty or so pages earlier; the pictures in Jack the Modernist are dispersed, sort of like the pictures in Nadja, […]

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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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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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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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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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The Multitudes of the Family Restaurant: Q&A with Curtis Chin

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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 […]

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The Era of Prohibition as Feminist History: Q&A with Gioia Diliberto

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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 […]

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The Human Spirit in the Language: Interview with Francisco Goldman

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I met Francisco Goldman in the summer of 2022, outside a cafe in the San Miguel neighborhood of Mexico City, some blocks from the apartment he shares with his wife, their daughter, and his wife’s niece (who lives under their care). Months before, I’d written a review about Goldman’s latest novel, the Pulitzer Prize-finalist Monkey Boy. He was an author whose books I’d loved immoderately for years, an author whose best lines I cherished and could recite word for word, not misplacing even a dash or a comma. I decided to approach the review as if it were a conversation […]

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Home as the Uncanny: Q&A with Laura van den Berg

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Laura van den Berg’s eerie latest novel, State of Paradise (224 pages; Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), resembles her other five acclaimed books—most notably an intense short story in I Hold a Wolf by the Ears and her first novel, Find Me, which was set during an epidemic that impacts memory—but deeply forges a path into original, glimmering territory. The book asks, What is real? And what if there are many realities and many ways of getting to them? For seamlessly meshing speculative and autobiographical elements, State of Paradise has been called “speculative autofiction.” (Van den Berg’s story collection Isle of […]

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Dream states: A conversation with Ed Park

by Evelyn Ch'ien

Posted on by John McMurtrie

How do we share history after it has already been claimed? That is the question at the heart of Ed Park’s latest novel. A fiction finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, Same Bed Different Dreams is a riveting, revisionist take on Korean and American history—or at least what is assumed to be Korean and American history. The reconstruction of history from 1919 to the contemporary era, with multiple characters intersecting through parallel timelines, propels the head-spinning momentum of the book, centered on the true but stealth, ghostlike existence of […]

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