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ZYZZYVA Events
May 4, 2019Bay Area Book Festival
Location: Outdoor Fair, Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Park, Berkeley
Description: Come visit our booth featuring new and select back issues, hoodies, T-shirts, and totes. More info here: https://bit.ly/2v0bedC
May 9, 2019The Art Issue Celebration, San Francisco
Location: 7 p.m., City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco
Description: Featuring contributors Cate Lycurgus, Dean Rader, Jordan Cantor, Rusty Morrison, and Mira Rosenthal; hosted by Managing Editor Oscar Villalon. Free. More info here: https://bit.ly/2D6VZ7k
May 16, 2019The Art Issue Celebration, East Bay
Location: 6 p.m., Traywick Contemporary, 895 Colusa Ave, Berkeley
Description: Featuring contributors Heather Altfeld, Dan Alter, Toni Martin, Troy Jollimore, and Diana Guerrero-Macia. Emceed by Managing Editor Oscar Villalon. Free.
May 30, 2019In Conversation with Kathleen Alcott
Location: 7:30 p.m., The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco
Description: Alcott, author of the novels "Infinite Home" and "The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets," discusses her new book, "America Was Hard to Find" (Ecco), with Managing Editor Oscar Villalon. https://bit.ly/2IEY2Ty
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Tag Archives: book review
‘Bright Stain’ by Francesca Bell: A Universe of Pain
Francesca Bell’s first book of poetry, Bright Stain (104 pages; Red Hen Press), reflects a dark universe in which sexual pleasure and pain are intricately linked. There are bright moments of delight, but few without an aftertaste. This debut collection is impressive for it’s distinctive voice and pungent imagery. Many of the poems deal with the jolts of adolescent sexual awakening, its heat and surprise and terror, and Bell is not afraid of putting both her vulnerability and hunger on display: By fourteen, I had transformed, body gone from tight-fisted to extravagant… No blouse would button over my excess. Nothing …Continue reading
‘Little Boy’ by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Life as an Endless Novel
“And so do I return to the monologue of my life seen as an endless novel.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Little Boy (179 pages; Doubleday) is aptly self-identified as “unapologetically unclassifiable” on its jacket copy, and the poet Billy Collins called it a “torrent of consciousness” in his own review. Both descriptions are fitting for the short but powerful work by the now 100-year-old Ferlinghetti. Little Boy begins as a rather fast-paced novel, narrated in the third person, based on Ferlinghetti’s childhood. It tells the story of Little Boy, who was raised by his Aunt Emily, later was moved to an orphanage, and …Continue reading
‘The Altruists’ by Andrew Ridker: The Good Life
Andrew Ridker’s first novel, The Altruists (308 pages; Viking), follows a middle-class family, the Alters, as they struggle with the impact of unexpected wealth. Ridker is merciless in skewering each member of the family, and nearly every aspect of modern culture, from campus identity politics and the queer dating scene to poorly planned foreign aid missions. The novel’s wickedly dark sense of humor combines with a complex plot to create a compelling debut. The story centers around Arthur Alter, a rapidly aging, untenured professor at a middling St. Louis university who is close to defaulting on the mortgage for his …Continue reading
‘Fire Season’ by Patrick Coleman: Intergenerational Interpretations
We poets often pride ourselves on exploiting the many interpretations that figurative language affords us, and so we may shy away from visuals for fear they will detract from this ability to embody multiple meanings without sacrificing substance that we think separates “real” poetry from most prose. And though we may write poems inspired by visual art, we rarely include images of these works in books. Not so with Patrick Coleman’s Fire Season (102 pages; Tupelo Press). Initially, I expected the images paired with poems in the book to be too on the nose and/or to give away too much. …Continue reading
‘The Collected Schizophrenias’ by Esmé Weijun Wang: A Map into Rarely Charted Waters
Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (202 pages; Graywolf Press) consists of twelve essays addressing the technical definitions, medical prognosis, and personal challenges of schizophrenia. In the first essay, Wang discloses her own diagnosis to the reader: during her time as an undergraduate at Yale, she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder (bipolar type), which she describes as an illness that combines certain behavioral markers of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She makes it clear the schizophrenias (of which there are a few types) are both complex and vast in how they are perceived and experienced. Wang manages to discuss such a …Continue reading
‘Gingerbread’ by Helen Oyeyemi: Ever-Shifting Nature
Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel Gingerbread (258 pages; Riverhead), revolves around the fictional country of Druhástrana, an “alleged nation state of indeterminable geographic location” that may or may not exist, depending on who you ask. Druhá Strana roughly translates from Slovak to “the other side” or “the flipside,” a fitting name for a nation that bears more resemblance to a half-remembered fever dream than any currently existing country. Gingerbread mirrors the ever-shifting nature of Druhástrana in many ways, with its circular and occasionally conflicting narratives leaving the reader frantically performing mental gymnastics in order to keep up. The novel focuses on …Continue reading
‘Territory of Light’ by Yuko Tsushima: A New Life in Tokyo
Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light (183 pages, FSG; translated by Geraldine Harcourt) begins when the husband of the narrator, Mrs. Fujino, leaves her. After months of apartment hunting, she moves with her two year-old daughter into a new building. The apartment is abundant with light most hours of the day, but it fails to illuminate their lives the way she hoped it would. The novel consists of twelve brief chapters, each one a vignette of life in Tokyo with an inquisitive and sometimes unruly daughter. (The narrative was originally published in Japan in twelve installments, between 1978 and 1979.) At …Continue reading
‘Rag’ by Maryse Meijer: Refusing to Flinch
In Maryse Meijer’s new collection, Rag (144 pages; FSG), the final and eponymous story is written from the point of view of a rag stuffed down a woman’s throat, slowly killing her. Reading Rag feels a bit like this, as the fourteen unsettling stories leave you gasping for air. With terse, dark prose, Meijer has created a cohesive set of stories which seem to delight in exploring taboos and destroying expectations. These stories are unsettlingly honest, with the most twisted inner thoughts of each principal character laid bare for the reader. Rag is at its strongest when delving into the …Continue reading
Sarah Moss’s ‘Ghost Wall’: Sacrificed to History
In Sarah Moss’s novel, Ghost Wall (130 pages; FSG), seventeen-year-old Silvie embarks on a trip to rural northeastern England with her family and a university archaeology class. Silvie’s father, Bill, earns a living as a bus driver, but his true passion is for the history of the Iron Age and its “bog people,” the ancient Britons who were sacrificed in this region centuries ago. Over the course of the two-week trip, the small group attempts to reenact the lifestyle of 1000 B.C., wearing scratchy tunics and hunting and foraging for their meals. For Bill, the trip is a chance to …Continue reading
Young and Out of Control: ‘Last Night in Nuuk’ by Niviaq Korneliussen
Niviaq Korneliussen’s first novel, Last Night in Nuuk (288 pages; Grove Press), is first and foremost a character study. (In an immediate indicator that the book is primarily driven by its multiple protagonists, it opens with a literal “Cast of Characters.”) Korneliussen, who is from Greenland, explores in distinct sections the perspectives of five different people and in the process shows us what it means to be young and queer in her homeland. The characters are all handled tenderly and with obvious care, and each stream of consciousness narrative can stand alone but fit neatly into this larger work. Living …Continue reading
Dreamwalking in the Modern World: ‘The Day the Sun Died’ by Yan Lianke
Yan Lianke’s latest novel, The Day the Sun Died (342 pages; Grove Press; translated by Carlos Rojas), manages to strike a balance between humor and horror as the world crumbles over the course of one very long night in Gaotian Village, China. The story is told from the perspective of fourteen-year-old Li Niannian, whose parents own the village funerary shop, and opens with a somewhat chaotic preface in which Li Niannian calls out to the spirit world, asking them to listen as he recounts the night’s bizarre events. On this night of the great somnambulism, the people of the village …Continue reading
