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Q&A with Carribean Fragoza: ‘Eat the Mouth That Feeds You’ and the Wounds We Carry

by Ray Levy Uyeda

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Carribean Fragoza’s debut book of fiction, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You (144 pages; City Lights Publishers), is a collection of supernatural, almost mythical short stories. Set in Fragoza’s home town of South El Monte, a suburb east of Los Angeles, the collection explores what kind of violence is exchanged intergenerationally and what happens when the resulting wounds are not attended to. Fragoza’s characters, all of whom are Chicanx or Mexican women, explore the many worlds of their bodies, minds, and lineages. Carribean Fragoza recently spoke to ZYZZYVA via Zoom about Eat The Mouth That Feeds You. ZYZZYVA: The first […]

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The Blue Angels / The Spirituals App

by David Roderick

Posted on by John McMurtrie

The Blue Angels Have you heard the sound of them during Fleet Week the threat of our brute aerial power flaying whole afternoons in formation and turgid fumes over the Bay my friend at the Chron says they fly 700 mph and 18 inches apart skimming the filigree of a sound barrier until they bang through fog like a truncheon hitting a skull I first heard them as a young man newly-arrived in SF and immediately thought more towers were about to fall bombs whistling down bridge cables snapped and yet another date enshrined with our national fear I ducked […]

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‘The Seamus’

by Tara Ison

Posted on 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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The dead: On writing a thriller set in the rock world

by Christine Sneed

Posted on by John McMurtrie

I met Sarah Tomlinson last year in Los Angeles at a book event for a mutual friend. It was an unseasonably cool night, but spirits were high—our friend’s book was doing well, and it was almost summer. After the reading, Sarah and I had a long, discursive conversation about film, TV shows, and books. During our chat, I learned that after working as a music critic in Boston, Sarah had moved to Southern California in the mid-aughts and transitioned to ghostwriting. She has published more than twenty books as a ghostwriter, and has also written a memoir, Good Girl (2015), […]

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Turkey? Non, merci

by John McMurtrie

Posted on by John McMurtrie

One of the worst turkey dinners I ever had in my life was in France. It was the mid-1980s, and I was on a year abroad in Paris. The program’s well-intentioned directors must have thought that this band of young Americans, an ocean away from their families, would be homesick on Thanksgiving. And so they brought us to an elegant restaurant in the center of town, not far from the Louvre. We had the place to ourselves, and—surprise!—the kitchen staff had been instructed by our minders to prepare us turkey, known as dinde in France, but not known as a bird that […]

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The malleability of memory: A conversation with Mary Otis

by Laura Cogan

Posted on by John McMurtrie

In her debut novel, Burst, Mary Otis traces the tumultuous lives and conflicted bond of a mother and daughter navigating the world without a robust community or safety net: they are “alone but together.” Charlotte’s eccentric, sometimes erratic behavior both enchants and repels her daughter, Viva, who seeks structure and security through a single-minded dedication to her passion for dance. But this mother-daughter duo is more alike—and more connected—than they can sometimes understand, and Otis locates the poignancy of their parallel lives with insight and compassion. Moving seamlessly between perspectives and over years, Burst elegantly examines the complexity of this […]

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‘The epic nature of our own stories’: A conversation with Héctor Tobar

by John McMurtrie

Posted on by John McMurtrie

Héctor Tobar has explored Latin American history and the Latino experience in numerous award-winning best-selling works, ranging from novels (The Last Great Road Bum, The Barbarian Nurseries, and The Tattooed Soldier) to nonfiction books (Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free and Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States). Tobar has also published fiction and nonfiction in Zyzzyva. In his latest book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino,” Tobar delves with great candor […]

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‘Moldova’

by Ruth Madievsky

Posted on 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

Subscribers only: to access this content, you must be a member of ZYZZYVA Studio. Membership is included with any subscription. Subscribe today, or if you are already a subscriber, log in to continue reading. (Read our FAQ for more details, and contact us if you have any trouble logging in.)

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Rebecca Rukeyser & Liska Jacobs in conversation on ‘The Pink Hotel’ and ‘The Seaplane on Final Approach’

by Rebecca Rukeyser & Liska Jacobs

Posted on by Zack Ravas

I read Liska Jacob’s The Pink Hotel (336 pages; MCD) at the end of this summer. August is an unwholesome month, especially in Berlin. The city becomes a swamp, and every bakery display case is filled with wasps feeding on poppyseed cake and apple strudel. But reading the gleefully anarchic The Pink Hotel is the most unwholesome thing I did this August. I mean that as the highest compliment. This book lulls you with the low incessant murmur of opulence. You begin with healthy skepticism toward the trappings of obscene wealth, but diamond watches start to sound pretty. Daily spa […]

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ZYZZYVA Staff Recommends August 2022: What to Watch, Read, & Listen To

by ZYZZYVA Staff

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Isabelle Edgar, Intern: I had never seen a movie that felt so much like a poem until I saw Petite Maman (2022), directed by Céline Sciamma. Like a poem, the movie is quite short –at just seventy two minutes– and quiet, with only one song in the whole movie (a trademark of Céline Sciamma; think Portrait of a Lady on Fire). Like a poem, Petite Maman’s silence is as meaningful as its words. You have to lean in, kneel down, and listen closely: a whisper from a child’s lips. As the lead in the movie says to her father and […]

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