The Wedding Visitor

by Elizabeth Spencer

ZYZZYVA Volume 29, #2, Fall 2013

It seemed a good thing to do and because he hadn’t come there in so long, he went slowly. Approaching the house from the road before it spiraled up the drive, he sat for a while and gave it a long look. Like many Southern houses, the original structure was almost lost among the many

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Photisms

by Juan Pablo Villalobos

It might not feel much like Halloween this year, but it is Halloween, so we’re celebrating with a spooky tale you can find in Issue 99. We promise it’s more treat than trick, so read on: The chubby little boy remains impassive. Mamá and Papá have left the consulting room now, leaving him on his own, but even so he’s not fazed by the situation, he’s over there, just quietly sitting like it’s no big deal, in total control of the moment. Suddenly, before the psychiatrist can say anything, he raises his right arm with the index finger outstretched, as […]

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In the Winter Issue

by ZYZZYVA

In our newest issue, time and worlds bend: In Juan Pablo Villalobos’s “Photisms”: A little boy tells his distracted psychiatrist that he sees mysterious green lights and hears a voice telling him, “See you in the non-world.” In Lisa Teasley’s “Full Circle”: The bonds between a couple stretch across eras and genders, forged by incredible loss, rancor, and love. In Monique Wentzel’s “Modern Speedwash”: A struggling woman finds a portal to a universe she’s made different choices and has a comfortable life to show for it. But can she so easily give up the life she knew before? And in […]

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In the Fall Issue

by ZYZZYVA

In our newest issue, ZYZZYVA asks: Having kids—what could possibly go wrong? In Eric Puchner’s “Heavenland,” a stalled L.A. artist finds his style—and his relationships—severely cramped after the birth of his son. In Vanessa Hua’s “A River of Stars,” a pregnant mistress in Southern California is cornered by the wishes of her married lover in China. In Nana K. Twumasi’s “Pica,” a widowed father tries to make sense of his young daughter’s troubling eating compulsion. And in Kate Milliken’s “A Matter of Time,” a suburban mother hopes a dinner party with an old and successful friend can salvage her dreams. […]

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A Cowboy Crosses the Border in Silence

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Diego Enrique Osorno is the author of El Cartel de Sinaloa: Uno Historia del Uso Politico del Narco (The Sinaloa Cartel: A History of the Political Use of the Narco) and La Guerra de Los Zetas (The War of the Zetas). Osorno was awarded the Proceso International Journalism Prize in 2011, and his nonfiction on Mexico’s drug war, “The Battle of Ciudad Mier,” was published in ZYZZYVA’s Spring 2012 issue.

His nonfiction piece about his beloved deaf-mute uncle Geronimo, “A Cowboy Crosses the Border in Silence,” appears in the Spring/Summer issue of ZYZZYVA. It’s a thoughtful examination of a singular life, and a rare look into the world of deaf Mexican immigrants and their community in the United States. The work is translated by Emma Friedland, who is the editorial director of the website the Borderland Chronicles. The following is an excerpt.

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Cardioplegia

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Dani Shapiro is the author of the bestselling memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and the author of five novels, the most recent being Black & White and Family History. (Her newest book, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life (Atlantic), comes out in October.)

“Cardioplegia” is her new story, published in the Spring/Summer issue of ZYZZYVA. The title refers to the deliberate arrest of the heart during an operation so that surgery may be performed upon the organ. In her story, it also refers to the thawing of her protagonist’s soul, a middle-aged man who “had been dying a little bit each year” … “had been feeling numb from the neck down, a head bobbling along on a set of insensate shoulders, all brains and no heart, just getting through day after day.” The story finds him reluctant at a mind-body retreat out West with his much younger (and new) love, recovering from a triple bypass and trying to make sense of it all. The following is an excerpt.

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Life Span

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Molly Giles is a novelist and short-story writer. Her books include the novel “Iron Shoes” and “Creek Walk and Other Stories.” She has been awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and taught at San Francisco State University. A former professor at the University of Arkansas, Giles has recently retired and moved back to the Bay Area.

Her story in the Spring/Summer issue of ZYZZYVA, “Life Span,” could be looked at as a work of homecoming. It’s a meditation on a life rooted in Northern California, one in which the Golden Gate Bridge looms large in the narrator’s memory, becoming a steady presence throughout the many changes detailed in the story. The following is an excerpt.

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Out of Notebooks

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W.S. Di Piero, who lives in San Francisco, is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry (his most recent being Nitro Nights (Copper Canyon)) and is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation of Chicago.

Di Piero’s poetry has appeared in ZYZZYVA’s Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 issues. (His poem in the Spring issue, “There Were Such Things,” received a 2013 Pushcart Prize.) And now his nonfiction can be read in ZYZZYVA’s Spring/Summer issue. “Out of Notebooks” is an essay of sorts, a collection of thoughts and observations, ranging from subjects such as physical pain to the nature of poetry, and taking as its settings places such as a BART car or a museum room. The following is an excerpt.

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Adventures in Language School

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Joseph Di Prisco is the author of several books, including novels—the most recent of which is All for Now (MacAdam/Cage)—and two poetry collections. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Prairie Schooner, and The Threepenny Review, and his poetry was published in the Winter 2011 issue of ZYZZYVA.

Two new poems by Di Prisco appear in ZYZZYVA’s Spring/Summer issue: “Symptomatology” and “Adventures in Language School.” Here we present the latter, which is characteristic of the humor and the warmth that imbues Di Prisco’s charming poetry.

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The Chinese Barracks

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A native of Davis, California, Rebecca Rukeyser is a creative writing instructor at the University of Iowa. But before landing in Iowa City, Rukeyser had lived and worked in Istanbul, in Kawasaki, Japan, and in Ulsan, South Korea, and Santa Cruz, California.

Her story in ZYZZYVA’s Spring/Summer issue, “The Chinese Barracks,” tells the tale of a group of young people slogging through the salmon cannery season in Alaska. The work is dangerous, not least because of the sleep deprivation suffered by the men and women working the cannery floor. “The Chinese Barracks” marks Rukeyser’s first story in print. The following is an excerpt.

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L.C. Smith and Bros., Makers of Fine Guns and Typewriters, Advertise

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Alexandra Teague is assistant professor of poetry at the University of Idaho and the author of Mortal Geography (Persea), which won the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2010 California Book Award for poetry. Two of her poems appear in the Spring/Summer issue of ZYZZYVA.

The poems come from her manuscript in progress, The Wise and Foolish Builders, which, Teague says, “branches out from the story of Sarah Winchester, Victorian heiress to the rifle fortune, and the six-acre house she build in San Jose, California.” The poem “L.C. Smith and Bros., Makers of Fine Guns and Typewriters, Advertise” takes its verses from the sort of advertising copy employed by various companies of the era (e.g., Remington) to sell their typewriters and firearms. The following is the poem in full.

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Clear as Cake

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Lori Ostlund is the San Francisco author of the story collection The Bigness of the World (University of Georgia Press), which was awarded the California Book Award for First Fiction, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

As she points out in her bio, Ostlund “took a rather circuitous route to becoming a writer. I did not do an MFA program, though my intention was always to be a writer.” Her story, though, in ZYZZYVA’s Spring/Summer issue is set in an evening writing class at a Minnesota college. At a recent reading of “Clear as Cake” at Vesuvio, Ostlund had the crowd shaking with laughter. The story, we think you’ll find, is not only hilarious, but wise, too. The following is an excerpt.

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