ZYZZYVA Genres Archive: Fiction

by Zahid Rafiq

October 31, 2024

Posted on October 31, 2024 (October 31, 2024) by editor

None of us knew her real name. We heard her mother call her Beauty and she became Beauty for all of us. The day she arrived we were in the yard of Jana’s house, waiting desperately for the rain. Sameer had been hitting the ball all over the large yard, and nothing we did, chucking, distracting, changing the ball, nothing could get him out that afternoon. Our hopes clung to the gray clouds taking over the sky, threatening to wash away everything. And when we saw from a distance a thin-mustached man open the tin gate and a long, beaten-up […]

But One Thing Among the Living: ‘The Trees’ by Claudia Peña Claros

by H.L. Onstad

October 2, 2024

Posted on October 2, 2024 (September 19, 2024) by editor

Bolivian author Claudia Peña Claros’s new story collection, The Trees (118 pages; Relegation Books), translated by Robin Myers, blends acute awareness of plant and animal life with a keen perception of the rhythms of the everyday, noting telling details in the smallest occurrences. Peña Claros is also a poet, and this is evident throughout the inventive prose in The Trees. All of the senses are activated in these language-rich narratives that tend to focus on gender, justice, and the natural world: “We listen to the insects roaming our blood invisibly, anticipating our decay. We listen to the wriggling of the […]

Marital Dis: ‘Liars’ by Sarah Manguso

by H. L. Onstad

September 24, 2024

Posted on September 24, 2024 (September 24, 2024) by editor

Married women often provide more care and invisible labor out of love. But it’s the expectation that they will provide it, and the cultural moralism associated with how they do it, that informs Sarah Manguso’s newest tour de force, Liars (256 pages; Hogarth). Coming out at a time when the genre of divorce books is ever-expanding (Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters, Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, and Miranda July’s All Fours), Manguso’s novel explores the subject of abuse (including self-abuse) and presents marriage as a patriarchal institution inextricable from it. As Mary Beard wrote in Women & Power, “You can’t easily […]

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

by Anita Felicelli

September 23, 2024

Posted on September 23, 2024 (September 23, 2024) by editor

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 […]

The Balm: ‘All Friends Are Necessary’ by Tomas Moniz

by H.L. Onstad

September 19, 2024

Posted on September 19, 2024 (September 19, 2024) by editor

If we are to believe the doomsayers, entrenched problems like drugs, homelessness, car break-ins, and years of COVID isolation have led to a fraying of our social bonds that have turned cities—especially San Francisco and Oakland—into foreboding places people can’t leave soon enough. But from the opening pages of Tomas Moniz’s new novel, All Friends Are Necessary (288 pages; Algonquin), Moniz wrests our minds from the catastrophists by capturing the sheer exuberance of the San Francisco Bay Area—with its beloved parks, bars, museums, Mission Street bookstores, and East Bay cronut shops. The novel celebrates the quirky denizens who brim with […]

The Seamus

by Tara Ison

March 13, 2024

Posted on March 13, 2024 (April 26, 2024) by John McMurtrie

I always sensed beast in the house. From the time I could sense anything, I knew I could reach for and grip onto a shaggy coat, pull myself up to lean against a beastly wall of muscle. I knew the scent of tartar breath, the scalloped air of a swinging tail, the sponge of a

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Phone call

by Cynthia Zarin

December 14, 2023

Posted on December 14, 2023 (January 10, 2024) by John McMurtrie

Caroline is standing by the north ball fields in Central Park in the snow. It is February. There is some kind of construction going on—or it was going on—the big yellow trucks have stalled, but still, she has had to circumvent them. She is walking southeast, toward Seventy-Ninth Street, through the park. It is freezing.

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Good News

by Hannah Kingsley-Ma

November 27, 2023

Posted on November 27, 2023 (April 26, 2024) by John McMurtrie

Like a dog, I walked in through the back door and sniffed the air attentively. A rich, woody scent met me. Before I had a chance to call her name, Kira’s head poked out from behind the open refrigerator door. She stooped down again, her hands rooting around, rattling the various jars of mustard that lined the shelves. Julia, she said brightly. You’re early. Hi Kiki, I replied. What’s cooking? You’ll never guess, she said. She pushed herself up with her hands on her knees so she was standing tall. I have no idea, I told her. I’m trying. I […]

‘Moldova’

by Ruth Madievsky

June 16, 2023

Posted on June 16, 2023 (June 29, 2023) by John McMurtrie

Sasha and I landed in Kishinev as the sun was rising and took a bus from the tarmac to our terminal. I hadn’t slept on either of the flights and felt the edges of reality ungluing. The bus was stuffed to the windows with blue-eyed children waving American coloring books, women in sweatsuits carrying knockoff

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The Bus

by Nishanth Injam

June 6, 2023

Posted on June 6, 2023 (December 10, 2023) by John McMurtrie

The bus has a bathroom. Other buses that leave Bengaluru for my hometown don’t have bathrooms. They pull over on the highway when you have to pee, or they stop at a dhaba and the driver asks passengers to go so he won’t have to make extra stops along the way.The bus is a luxury

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Down a hole : ‘Kappa,’ by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

by Charlie Barton

June 5, 2023

Posted on June 5, 2023 (June 6, 2023) by John McMurtrie

A writer’s last work, the mere fact of it, ineluctably changes its meaning. Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa (96 pages; New Directions; translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell), is one such finale, the coda of a brief yet prolific career, a novella first published in 1927, months before this acclaimed author would kill himself. What does this book divulge about his psyche? Can this most condemned act be made legible? And it’s even more grotesque—but unavoidable—that one wonders if this work, written by the namesake of Japan’s foremost literary prize, is significant only because it’s his last. Akutagawa’s narrator, No. […]

After Dark

by Rhoda Huffey

January 5, 2023

Posted on January 5, 2023 (January 11, 2023) by Zack Ravas

When the pigeon first appeared in my front yard, I noticed because he didn’t fly off immediately. He walked over to the jade plant by my front porch and contemplated the leaves of the succulent. My mind was full of other things at that moment: what to wear to that evening, did a man named

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