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ZYZZYVA news.

A Profile of Kay Ryan by John Freeman: ZYZZYVA No. 106, Spring/Summer

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ZYZZYVSpring2016coverJohn Freeman is the author of How to Read a Novelist (FSG), the editor of the literary journal Freeman’s, and a contributing editor to ZYZZYVA. He is also a poet whose work has been published in The New Yorker and ZYZZYVA, and is currently working on a book about American poetry.

His feature on former U.S. poet laureate and longtime Bay Area resident Kay Ryan—set at a restaurant in the Presidio on a warm San Francisco day—launches a new component of ZYZZYVA: author profiles and conversations. (In our next issue, we’ll be publishing a conversation on memoir between Andrew Foster Altschul and Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff.) The following is an excerpt from Freeman’s profile. You can read it in its entirety in Issue No. 106, which you can order here.

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Thwarted Pilgrimage: ‘White Sands’ by Geoff Dyer

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There are a few different types of ignorance at work in Geoff Dyer’s new book, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, a collection of essays that combine travel writing and art criticism. One kind is artificial ignorance as an interpretative tool. Often, when he is ignoring information, sloughing off context on which another critic might lean all his weight, Dyer (or the genre-bending author’s narrator whom I will call Dyer) is at his sharpest. In “Space in Time,” the author travels to Quemado, New Mexico, to see Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, but he holds off telling us […]

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Realism’s Inability to Portray Reality: A Q&A with ‘Man & Wife’ Author Katie Chase

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An internal refugee crisis in the United States; a modern America that tolerates decades-old, interfamilial vendettas; a city that keeps burning down year after year—these are the kinds of warped worlds captured in Katie Chase’s story collection, Man & Wife (220 pages; A Strange Object). Within these surrealities, Chase exaggerates societal traditions into distended proportions, focusing on the experiences of women at pivotal moments in their youth, examining their family dynamics, and, concurrently, their strange societies’ shifting norms. What’s even more unsettling is how eerily similar these worlds (and all the dramas that exist within them) are to our own. […]

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The Inheritance of Trauma: Q&A with Adrienne Celt & Esmé Weijun Wang

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I’m not entirely sure where I happened upon Adrienne Celt’s beautiful first novel, The Daughters (272 pages; Norton/Liveright), which is out in paperback in early June, but entering its world was like entering a beautiful fever dream: ornate, occasionally frightening and sad. Celt’s world, peopled by four generations of Polish and Polish American women, tells the story of Lulu, a famed opera singer who loses her voice and sifts through her family’s stories to locate a way forward for herself and her newborn daughter. Celt’s work has appeared in Esquire, the Kenyon Review, and her story “Big Boss Bitch,” a […]

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Forms of Self-Interrogation: Q&A with ‘Emergency Brake’ Author Ruth Madievsky

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In Ruth Madievsky’s Emergency Brake, a body is never just a body. Rather, it is a looted ship, a lit match, a bedtime story, a lamp. In other moments, the body is known only by what it contains: a rope, a salted pretzel, “the sound of a penny thrown in a blender.” Madievsky’s poems put domestic objects to work, personifying and reframing embodied experience like puppets with the poet’s hands inside. And in her fiery first collection, published by Tavern Books as a Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series selection, her talent for analogy is on full display. In addition to a […]

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‘On the Road’ by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch: ZYZZYVA No. 106, Spring

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Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch is the author of the poetry collections “Rockclimbing in Silk” (Seren), “Not in These Shoes” (Picador), and “Banjo” (Picador). In 2014 she held a residency at the Dylan Thomas Boathouse to mark the centenary of the poet’s birth, and she is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship. She lives in Wales.

Two of her poems appear in ZYZZYVA’s Spring/Summer Issue (No. 106), including “On the Road.” An examination of Madame Tusaud and her long-lasting craft of wax figures, “On the Road” isn’t so much intrigued by the Tusaud’s waxworks as it is by how they ever came about. “To make the dead appear living, the living dead//without quite meaning to, is a skill I cannot/ yet take in …,” says the poem’s speaker. What follows is the poem in its entirety.

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The Extremities of Human Experience: Q&A with ‘I Met Someone’ Author Bruce Wagner

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The fact that the dust jacket for Bruce Wagner’s latest novel, I Met Someone (Blue Rider Press; 384 pages), carries blurbs from award-winning author Sherman Alexie as well as acclaimed filmmaker Steven Soderbergh reveals how adroitly Wagner has been able to navigate both the literary scene and the world of Hollywood. Over the last several years, Wagner has been at work on what he calls the Inferno series, starting with 2012’s Dead Stars, a sprawling and densely packed novel about life on the fringes of stardom, which Tom Bissell dubbed “the Ulysses of TMZ culture.” In 2015, David Cronenberg directed […]

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In the Spring/Summer Issue

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Issue No. 106 offers for your enjoyment more of the country’s finest stories, poetry, essays, and visual art: Ariel Dorfman’s “Amboise”: A long-time couple’s trip to France, in which perhaps only one of them will return from. Soma Mei Sheng Frazier’s “Clutter”: A riot of memories and thoughts pulls a stroke victim through the past and the present. Lou Mathew’s “Last Dance”: Can a widower find it in himself to grant his annoying neighbor (who makes a mean tamale) a beseeched courtesy? Ashley Nelson Levy’s “Auntie”: A teen daughter makes room in more ways than one for her mother’s dying […]

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Lucia Berlin: The Art of Phantom Pain

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I met Lucia Berlin in 1977, the year her first small book appeared, but it wasn’t till I published her collection Phantom Pain that we became great friends (Tombouctou Books, Bolinas, 1984). Lucia was working at Alta Bates Hospital then, in Berkeley, at the switchboard and in the waiting rooms. Hospital work suited her. She was interested in extremities, in gossip, in contrary people with serious complaints, who also felt relieved to be alive. It was hard, low-paying work. She would have preferred to be writing, but she almost never said so. She did produce several new hospital stories (“Emergency […]

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‘Chumship’ by Kristopher Jansma: ZYZZYVA No. 105, Winter 2015

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Kristopher Jansma’s first novel, “The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards” (Viking), was the winner of the 2014 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award and a finalist for the Prix de l’Inapperçu, as well as a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick and an ABA “Indie Next” Choice. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, the New York Times, the Believer, The Millions, and other publications. His novel “Why We Came to the City” will be published by Viking in February. His story “Chumship” appears in the Winter issue.

“Chumship” lays out the friendship between two boys, Clark and the narrator, through high school and into college. The narrator is in thrall of droll Clark, who has an innate gift for spinning fictions, including a plan for hatching an imaginary girlfriend as a ploy for getting an actual one. Funny yet tender, Jansma’s story makes the most of its theme about the lies we tell others and ourselves. The following is an excerpt.

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The Poison of a Long Imprisonment: Liu Xia’s ‘Empty Chairs’

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Loneliness is palpable among the stark emotions of Beijing artist and poet Liu Xia’s Empty Chairs: Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 118 pages), The collection, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern, spans from 1983 to 2013, and shudders under the weight of political and psychological violence: the 1989 Tiananmen massacre; the multiple (and current) imprisonments of Liu Xia’s husband, poet and activist Liu Xiaobo; the eleven-year sentence of her younger brother, Liu Hui. At the center of these circumstances sits Liu Xia, who has been living under strict house arrest since her husband received the 2010 Nobel […]

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On Concluding Our 30th Anniversary: Letter From the Editor: Issue No. 105

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Dear Reader, In 1946, Lionel Trilling penned a barbed sort of defense of “little magazines”: “They are snickered at and snubbed, sometimes deservedly, and no one would venture to say in a precise way just what effect they have—except that they keep the new talents warm until the commercial publisher with his customary air of noble resolution is ready to take his chance, except that they make the official representatives of literature a little uneasy, except that they keep a countercurrent moving which perhaps no one will be fully aware of until it ceases to move.” In her introduction to […]

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