Exploring the emotional gaps created by grief and prolonged silence, Frances Itani’s new novel, Tell (Black Cat Press; 318 pages), is the story of a Canadian family coping with the fallout of the First World War. Picking up the thread from Itani’s 2003 novel, Deafening, Tell weaves an intricate narrative of two couples struggling with things left unsaid. The novel opens in 1921 before flashing back in time, with the bulk of the story occurring in the last two months of 1919. Tress and Kenan are a young couple trying to reconnect after Kenan’s return from the front; meanwhile, Am […]
Category: News
ZYZZYVA news.
A Mental Hospital’s Foreboding Power: ‘The Forgetting Place’ by John Burley
by Bjorn Svendsen
“Menaker State Hospital is a curse, a refuge, a place of imprisonment, a necessity, a nightmare, a salvation.” So opens John Burley’s The Forgetting Place (344 pages; HarperCollins), an atmospheric medical thriller with a fictional mental hospital as its core setting. Burley’s new novel follows resident psychiatrist Dr. Lise Shields, who is assigned a new patient, Jason Edwards, who has a mysterious past and an even more secretive admission. Much of the novel’s first half is spent on Dr. Shields’ attempts to coax the truth out of her reluctant patient and the hospital administration. Faced with a bureaucratic stonewall, Dr. […]
A Haven for the Printed Work: Q&A with the Book Club of California’s Jennifer Sime
by Regina Marler
The Book Club of California—with a 102-year history of fine letterpress publishing and support for hand-press printers—is a bibliophile’s delight and refuge. Sedately described by someone on its website as “a non-profit organization of people who take pleasure in fine printing related to the history and literature of California and the western states,” the San Francisco organization has an impressive and unexpectedly adventurous 3,000-volume collection, which ranges from a cuneiform tablet to a 15th century incunabula to a one-off book printed with alphabet cereal. The largest group for book collectors in the country, the Book Club also hosts exhibitions and […]
The Dialogue Between Motherhood and War: ‘Blood Lyrics’ by Katie Ford
by Sarah Coolidge
In her most recent book of poetry, which came out in late 2014, Katie Ford offers a raw and thoughtful look at the frailty of life, tracing the fragile line traversed alike by her premature infant daughter and the countless victims of war. Blood Lyrics (Graywolf Press, 62 pages) resembles a book of hymns, hauntingly personal, one piece coursing like blood into the next. Some of these poems ought to be delivered in a funereal whisper, others chanted to the rhythm of pumping hearts. Life and death are intimately connected, one necessitating the other. In the first poem, “A Spell,” […]
Realism and the Fantastic as Very Much the Same: Q&A with Kathryn Davis
by Cristina Fries
In Kathryn Davis’ novel Duplex (Graywolf Press, 195 pages), the suburban mundane is interrupted by the magical, the mythic, and the bizarre. In a neighborhood of duplex housing, kids play on the street as robot neighbors fly past them, sorcerers and Bodies Without Souls drive by in Mercedes, and teddy bears become human babies. Two coexisting narratives alternate from chapter to chapter, as two worlds slide past each other and often overlap. The intimacy between these worlds is such that the particularities of each echo the other, the realities of both merging into one. The novel, recently published in paperback, […]
A Possible Way for Tech and Artists to Work Together?: Digital Art from Depict
by Larissa Archer
A lot of the conversation in the Bay Area about art and tech describes an alienated, if not antagonistic relationship between the two spheres. Tech workers “displace” artists in much of the dialogue about rising rents and gentrification. Tech also threatens art by making its replicability ever easier and cheaper, and by fostering a culture of consumption that habituates people to enjoying the works of writers, artists, actors, and musicians for free. And yet, a fruitful relationship between the two camps isn’t impossible. San Francisco startup Depict is hoping it has found a way to (in startup language) “optimize” the […]
In the Winter Issue
by ZYZZYVA
Issue No. 102 offers for your enjoyment more of the country’s finest stories, poetry, essays, and visual art: Michael Jaime-Becerra’s “Omer, March 1987”: A boy out skateboarding stumbles upon his mother’s affair. Melissa Yancy’s “Dog Years”: A scientist must make time for her family, her career, and, somewhere in there, cure one son of his devastating disease. Laura Esther Wolfson’s “Infelicities of Style”: In the hinterlands, a young dance critic experiences the complications of art. Octavio Solis’s “Retablos”: How may times has El Paso lamed him? Yet how many times has he walked back to his past walked away? Plus, […]
Finding Communion with Characters Half a World Away: Q&A with Jack Livings
by Oscar Villalon
Back in late July, Michiko Kakutani gave a first book of fiction the sort of review authors rarely receive. It was an unqualified rave of Jack Livings’ story collection, The Dog (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; 240 pages). “With ‘The Dog’,” Kakutani concluded, “Mr. Livings has made an incisive—and highly impressive—debut.” One could go even further. With The Dog, and its eight brilliantly told stories set in contemporary China, Jack Livings has delivered one of the best books of 2014—if not the best debut work of fiction by an American writer this year. Much as Ken Kalfus did with Russian society […]
Appreciating the Engaging Decade-Long Conversation Started by n+1
by Alexander Helmintoller
The collected pieces in Happiness: Ten Years of n+1 (369 pages; Faber and Faber) range from scintillating reflection, sharp economic or social analysis, realistic and depressing conclusions regarding the fate of the world economy, climate change, and the nature of humankind to the transformation of communication in the technological age, an extended satire on hypochondria and disease in America, and the perverted image of sexuality and portrayal of the self in media. Happiness is a conversation starter—easily accessible to any and all readers, yet nuanced enough to appeal to those who see what the current state of things really is. […]
ZYZZYVA in the 2014 Best American Series, Pushcart, and Best New Poets
by editor
The annual anthologies recognizing the best work among the hundreds of U.S. literary journals and magazines have once again been very kind toward ZYZZYVA. As we joyously reported on our Facebook page back in June, two marvelous works of fiction we published in 2013—marking the print debuts of young writers Daniel Tovrov and Rebecca Rukeyser—received major nods. Tovrov’s story “The News Cycle” (issue No. 99) will be appearing in the Pushcart Prize 2015 anthology, and Rukeyser’s story “The Chinese Barracks” (No. 97) will be included in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014. Now we can add to that list Jacques […]
In the Fall Issue
by ZYZZYVA
Issue No. 101 offers for your enjoyment more of the country’s finest stories, poetry, essays, and visual art: Vauhini Vara’s “We Were Here”: Betwixt the fancy turkey meatballs and Ava Gardner (no, not that one) dying down the hall, there exists in an apartment building all that could ever matter. Matt Sumell’s “Gift Horse”: Break into mom’s house, make sure you see Grams at her nursing home, and please, please try to keep it together. Soma Mei Sheng Frazier’s “Mr. Chompers”: Honey, the single mother asks her hypothetical husband, why can’t it be enough that her young daughter’s smart? Why […]
Mystery Mapped Across Backs: Geoff Nicholson’s ‘The City Under the Skin’
by Stefani Wright
Geoff Nicholson’s newest novel, The City Under the Skin (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 272 pages), takes place in an unnamed city where women are kidnapped, then released back into the streets, now bearing poorly tattooed maps across their backs. Told from various points of view, the winding story follows a handful of characters—Wrobleski, a professional killer who begins to collect these tattooed women; Billy Moore, a criminal trying to turn his life around but who agrees to one more job; Zak, who happens to work at a map shop and is unwillingly dragged into the mystery, and Marilyn, who’s obsessed […]