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ZYZZYVA Events
January 9, 2020Joan Didion: The 1960s & '70s: A Conversation
Time: 6:30 pm
– 7:30 pm
Location: The Mechanics' Institute, 57 Post Street, San Francisco
Description: ZYZZYVA Contributing Editor David L. Ulin will be in conversation with Managing Editor Oscar Villalon about Didion and the first volume of her work published by the Library of America and edited by Ulin. For more info: https://bit.ly/33kqu47
January 14, 2020Bay Area Issue Celebration
Time: 7:00 pm
– 8:00 pm
Location: City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco.
Description: Featuring Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Kevin Simmonds, Rita Bullwinkel, Chia-Chia Lin, Meg Hurtado Bloom, and Paul Wilner. Free. More info here: https://bit.ly/2pOClJN
January 24, 2020Bay Area Issue Celebration, East Bay
Time: 6:00 pm
– 7:00 pm
Location: East Bay Booksellers, 5433 College Ave., Oakland
Description: Featuring Matthew Zapruder, Lydia Conklin, Nina Schulyer, sam sax, Andrew Roe, and Sara Mumolo. Free.
February 6, 2020Bay Area Issue Celebration
Time: 6:00 pm
– 7:00 pm
Location: Mechanics' Institute, 57 Post Street, San Francisco
Description: Featuring Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, Michael Sears, Gloria Frym, and W.S. Di Piero. Free.
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Tag Archives: book review
‘Space Invaders’ by Nona Fernández: Mutations of Reality
To replicate child-like bewilderment rather than to simply retell it is an enviable feat—one that Nona Fernández masters in Space Invaders (88 pages; Graywolf Press; translated by Natasha Wimmer). Bordering on autofiction, the short novel calls upon Fernández’s childhood in Chilé in the ’80s during the turmoil surrounding dictator Pinochet’s unseating, and looks at how those times pervade the lives of the fifth-graders who center the story, and manifest in unexpected and devastating ways The young community faces police brutality and various other traumas, culminating in the disappearance of Estrella—a well-loved peer who vanishes without explanation. The story is primarily …Continue reading
‘On Valencia Street: Poems & Ephemera’ by Jack Micheline: A Return to San Francisco’s Core
“The art world is so fucking boring it could make your heart cry,” writes the late Jack Micheline in On Valencia Street: Poems & Ephemera (133 pages; Lithic Press; edited by Tate Swindell), and it’s a phrase that neatly captures the vibrancy of Micheline’s gut-wrenching artistic project. On Valencia Street contains an array of unpublished work by the honorary Beat (Micheline purportedly derided the label of “Beat poet” as a “product of media hustle), as well as varying pieces of memorabilia, including drawings of a Basquiat-Johnston lovechild, posters for live readings, and nearly illegible notes written on napkins. Micheline’s aesthetic …Continue reading
‘We, the Survivors’ by Tash Aw: A Grim Portrait of Life Under Late Capitalism
The latest novel by Man Booker long-listed author Tash Aw offers a grim portrait of contemporary Asia under late capitalism. We, the Survivors (336 pages; FSG) traces the life of Ah Hock, a Malaysian-born citizen of Chinese heritage living a quiet life of solitude on the other side of a murder sentence. Ah Hock relays his story to a young journalist looking to shed light on the circumstances that led to Ah Hock’s violent crime, a crime he himself doesn’t quite understand. The murder is ultimately connected to Ah Hock’s former career as second-in-command at a local fish farm, as …Continue reading
‘In the Dream House’ by Carmen Maria Machado: No Mere Confessional
Carmen Maria Machado’s new book, In the Dream House (264 pages; Graywolf Press), begins with a statement of intention. Machado, the author of the acclaimed story collection Her Body and Other Parties, tells us she has written a memoir to add her story of queer domestic violence to the catalog of contemporary literature: “I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon,” she writes, “and that it can look something like this.” Depictions of intimate partner violence between women have been largely left out of our collective culture, …Continue reading
‘The Promise’ by Silvina Ocampo: Remembering How to Die
In The Promise (120 pages; City Lights Publishers; translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell) the nameless narrator, after falling over the handrail of a transport ship, recollects her life in a disparate series of largely character-based vignettes as she waits to drown or be rescued at sea. As she comes to in the ocean, she promises Saint Rita that in exchange for her life she will commit to publishing a book documenting a “dictionary of memories that are at times shameful, even humiliating.” And so the lone novel by the prolific Argentine author Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) becomes a …Continue reading
‘Black Card’ by Chris L. Terry: A Satirical Look at Racial Identity in America
Chris L. Terry’s new satirical and funny novel, Black Card (272 pages; Counterpoint), challenges ideas about race and identity as it follows its unnamed mixed-race narrator as he navigates the complex world of the punk rock scene in the American South, trying to understand where and how he can fit in—or if he can ever fit in. Structured episodically, Terry’s novel manages to address specific and thematically relevant incidents of the narrator’s life minus an overwhelming page count. “I was finally black again,” the novel begins, in 1997. “I sat on my bed, waiting for proof. Gray smoke oozed under …Continue reading
‘The Painted Forest’ by Krista Eastman: Thoroughly Acquainted with the World
Krista Eastman had been living away from her native Wisconsin for many years when she began writing her essay collection, The Painted Forest (144 pages; West Virginia University Press), and it was during this time that she began to consider the meaning of home. Once she left the small, working-class town in which she was raised, she told Poets & Writers, she found she often “had to explain myself and my home to others, putting a complicated place onto maps where previously there’d been nothing at all.” That’s when she “became interested in the role of telling about a place, …Continue reading
‘The Tradition’ by Jericho Brown: Bursts of Ecstasy and Longing
To some extent, every poet creates a persona. Think of Berryman’s Henry, for example. But Jericho Brown has done so more fully and convincingly than most. Born Nelson Dimery III, he answered to the name Jericho in a dream. In that dream the name allowed him go through a door. He later learned that the loose translation of the name is “defense,” and he discarded his birth name and became the unmistakably singular poet Jericho Brown. In the same way, he has transformed his evangelical fundamentalist upbringing into spirituality, physicality, and song. This transformation is showcased in his latest book, …Continue reading
‘Love and I’ by Fanny Howe: A Meander through a Singular Mind
Fanny Howe prefers to be alone—perhaps that’s what makes her such a perceptive poet. In her latest collection, Love and I (80 pages; Graywolf Press), the fruits of Howe’s solitude are on full display. Howe is introspective, curious, and content when she is by herself. Many of the poems in Love and I celebrate the comforts of being alone: I’ll sit at the window Where it’s safe to say no. Won’t go out, won’t work For a living, will study the clouds Becoming snow. That’s not to say Howe doesn’t grapple with the aches of loneliness as well: “Someone help …Continue reading
‘Be Recorder’ by Carmen Giménez Smith: A Call to Action
Anyone who has ever questioned the capacity of poetry to do something needs to read Carmen Giménez Smith’s newest collection, Be Recorder (88 pages; Graywolf Press). Be Recorder refuses to pretend it lives elsewhere, in some untouchable world of the lyric. Rather, each poem is undeniably here, in the now of state-generated violence and imperialism, of oppressive immigration policies, of love, of motherhood, of writerly politics. This list, while certainly marking many of Giménez Smith’s major attentions, is painfully incomplete: Be Recorder sees everything, even what it has yet to witness. It is this impulse –– to witness and uncover, …Continue reading
‘Home Remedies’ by Xuan Juliana Wang: Perfect Worlds
“Family,” “Love,” and “Time and Space” comprise the three sections of Xuan Juliana Wang’s first story collection, Home Remedies (204 pages; Hogarth). These categories describe this book better than much else could: Wang conjures an incredibly wide range of characters and plotlines, all tied together through notions of familial bonds, love, and temporality. There are no broad strokes or homogenizing glances in Wang’s work. These stories, concerned with Chinese young people and their engagements with culture, curiosity, and identity are complicated and specific, personal and detailed, messy and absurd. Each story Wang creates is so perfectly and wholly its own …Continue reading
‘The Churchgoer’ by Patrick Coleman: The Limits of Doubt
Even if Patrick Coleman’s first novel, The Churchgoer (354 pages; Harper Perennial), was not prefaced by a quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, the story’s noir flavors would be unmistakable. Mark Haines, a former youth pastor turned burned-out security guard and amateur surfer, lost his faith and more than a step when his beloved sister committed suicide years ago. In his rearview are a wife and a teen daughter who can barely swallow their bile to speak to him on the phone every so often. Meanwhile, always close at hand is the alcohol addiction he fights to keep a …Continue reading
