Interview Archives – Page 8 of 8

Q&A with Daniel Mason: Diagnosis and Distillation

by Regan McMahon

June 22, 2020

Posted on June 22, 2020 (June 24, 2020) by Zack Ravas

After publishing three novels, The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2005), and The Winter Soldier (2018), Bay Area author Daniel Mason released his first collection of short fiction in May, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (240 pages; Little, Brown). As he does in his longer works, he takes us into the minds and hearts of complex, nuanced characters and places them in intricately described settings, often in the natural word, detailed with the depth and precision of a botanist or anthropologist. He is, in fact, a man of science—by day he’s a clinical assistant professor in […]

The Great Danger: A Conversation with Arundhati Roy – Part II

by John Freeman

June 17, 2020

Posted on June 17, 2020 (June 16, 2020) by Zack Ravas

When Arundhati Roy’s long-awaited second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, appeared last year, some reviewers wondered what the writer from Kerala had been up to for two decades. She certainly wasn’t blocked. If you care about climate change, protested the war in Iraq, or have followed resistance to dams anywhere, she has been hard to miss. In fact, since 1995, the year The God of Small Things was published and won the Man Booker, catapulting the then-35-year-old novelist to worldwide fame, Roy has released more than a dozen works of reportage. Nuclear power, the state killing of Muslims in […]

The Great Danger: A Conversation with Arundhati Roy – Part I

by John Freeman

June 12, 2020

Posted on June 12, 2020 (June 16, 2020) by Zack Ravas

The following is Part I of an Interview with author Arundhati Roy you can read in its entirety in Issue 113, available on our Shop page. When Arundhati Roy’s long-awaited second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, appeared last year, some reviewers wondered what the writer from Kerala had been up to for two decades. She certainly wasn’t blocked. If you care about climate change, protested the war in Iraq, or have followed resistance to dams anywhere, she has been hard to miss. In fact, since 1995, the year The God of Small Things was published and won the Man […]

Q&A with Adam McOmber: ‘Jesus and John’ and Godot in Wonderland

by Christine Sneed

June 9, 2020

Posted on June 9, 2020 (June 4, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Adam McOmber’s new novel, Jesus and John (232 pages; Lethe Press), is a uniquely engrossing book, one that blends the sacred and the secular, the real and the surreal, and also offers an artful and subtle interrogation of what consciousness is and what, ultimately, it means to be alive. Not only is it a genre-defying novel, but the author immerses us in the strange world of ancient Rome, which at the time was the seat of a polytheistic empire. Throughout Jesus and John, there’s the inimitable sense of the biblical title characters advancing through a mysterious and possibly malevolent, maze-like Roman […]

Q&A WITH KATE MILLIKEN: ‘KEPT ANIMALS’ AND WRITING A TREACHEROUS LANDSCAPE

by K.L. Browne

April 21, 2020

Posted on April 21, 2020 (April 20, 2020) by Zack Ravas

In Kate Milliken’s first novel, Kept Animals (350 pages; Scribner), Topanga Canyon of the early ‘90s is an isolated, wild place, beautiful but vulnerable to the destruction and chaos of wildfire. Two teenage girls suffer loss one summer in this rugged canyon nestled beside a Los Angeles of wealth and celebrity. As they seek solace in one another, their connection ripples through the small community with dangerous consequences. Milliken’s clear-eyed telling weaves their story with that of Charlie, a young woman who two decades later searches into the mystery of this relationship and the fire that swept through Topanga. The […]

Talking Shop: Chia-Chia Lin on Writers’ Workshops, Pitfalls and Inspiration

by Alicia Long

March 2, 2020

Posted on March 2, 2020 (February 27, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Chia-Chia Lin’s debut novel The Unpassing (FSG) was released last year to widespread acclaim (it was named one of the Best Books of 2019 by TIME, The Washington Post, and Esquire). Her short story “Ring Around the Equator, Pockets Full of Acres” was featured in the Bay Area issue. And soon Lin will be teaching a Fiction Workshop that you can apply to now. Lin recently shared her thoughts on the Writers’ Workshop process, as well as some of the pitfalls students can avoid. ZYZZYVA: What do you think a Fiction Workshop can offer writers who feel their piece is […]

Draw a Bigger Circle: Q&A with Joyce Jenkins

by Meryl Natchez

February 26, 2020

Posted on February 26, 2020 (February 25, 2020) by Zack Ravas

To anyone in touch with the Bay Area literary scene, the publication Poetry Flash is part of the furniture—comfortable, essential, taken for granted. Its small office on Fourth Street in Berkeley is crammed with books, journals, and broadsides—a crush of continually incoming poetry, reviews, and fiction managed by Joyce Jenkins. She is the force behind this literary nexus, and has been dedicated to the Bay Area poetry world since the early ’70s, working daily to serve that community and advocate for the arts in general. This interview describes her history with Poetry Flash and how the non-profit organization has grown […]

Q&A with Daniel Handler: ‘Bottle Grove’ and a Changing San Francisco

by Oscar Villalon

December 16, 2019

Posted on December 16, 2019 (January 26, 2020) by Zack Ravas

In Daniel Handler’s seventh novel, Bottle Grove (227 pages; Bloomsbury), which was published in the fall, San Francisco gets both a kiss on the cheek and a flick to the ear. For those who have lived in the city for two or more decades, the novel has a magnetism perhaps unfelt by others who’ve only known the place in its most recent incarnation—as that of a giant Lego set, one pulled apart and restacked according to the heedless whims of the tech industry. Handler, a longtime San Franciscan, evokes the city in its beloved pre-boom familiarity, but because he’s telling […]

Q&A with Brandon Shimoda: ‘The Grave on the Wall’ and Writing with Ghosts

by Scout Turkel

September 12, 2019

Posted on September 12, 2019 (March 3, 2020) by Zack Ravas

How to capture a life, how to represent it, is a difficult if necessary question to address in writing. Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall (222 pages; City Lights Books) relentlessly contends with this concern as it recounts the story of Midori Shimoda, the author’s grandfather, within the entangled histories of immigration, Japanese incarceration during World War II, mourning, and memory. The book is also an examination of writing itself, the mechanism available for, and sometimes burdened with, conveying these stories; with relaying and reimagining them, opening them to visitation. A chronicle of the living and the dead and the places […]