Tag: San Francisco

Remembering Book Editor Pat Holt

by Regan McMahon

Posted on by John McMurtrie

When the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the Bay Area in 1989, Pat Holt remained at her desk, ignoring a co-worker’s urgent plea to take cover—choosing instead to stay on a phone call, making her passionate case to an author or publisher while her office swayed and rattled and books fell off the shelves around her. Such was Pat’s dedication to her work as the former book editor, critic, and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Pat, who devoted her career to her love of books, died December 3 at her home in San Francisco following a brief battle with cancer. […]

Continue Reading

Q&A with Emil DeAndreis: ‘Tell Us When to Go’ & a Changing San Francisco

by Isabelle Edgar

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Emil DeAndreis’ third novel, Tell Us When to Go (260 pages; Flexible Press), follows two college friends, Cole and Isaac, as their journey into post-recession San Francisco pulls them in very different directions. It’s a humorous and heartfelt story of friendship and baseball and the growing pains of both the city they love and the people who love it. DeAndreis, who is also the author of Beyond Folly (2013)and Hard to Grip (2017), teaches English at College of San Mateo. This interview was conducted over email and has been edited for length and clarity. ZYZZYVA: San Francisco feels like a […]

Continue Reading

Watch our City Lights Bookstore Event for Issue 123: The Poetry Issue

by ZYZZYVA Staff

Posted on by Zack Ravas

In case you missed it: you can now watch our recent remote event celebrating the release of Issue 123, our Poetry Issue, with iconic San Francisco bookstore City Lights! Enjoy readings by contributors Maggie Millner, Victoria, Adukwei Bulley, Ruth Madievsky, Chris Carosi, and Joan Baranow. The event was emceed by Zyzzyva’s Managing Editor, Oscar Villalon. You can watch it via the embedded video below. […]

Continue Reading

Slow Street Art

by Dominica Phetteplace

Posted on by Zack Ravas
Photo: Adrian Bonifacio

Stand on 24th Street and look north, uphill toward Sanchez Street, and you’ll see a bright orange landscape. Artist Amos Goldbaum has designed a mural that stretches from one end of the block toward the other—painted directly on the asphalt. I was enchanted with this work from the moment I first saw drone pictures of it on Instagram. Only a robot can give you the whole picture in one take: a superlong Victorian framed on one side by a riot of tiny houses that resolve as you travel uphill into a Twin Peaks, a lone palm, and then finally, Sutro […]

Continue Reading

The Bay Area Issue: Editor’s Note

by Laura Cogan

Posted on by editor

One day in July I ran into a colleague on my way to lunch. We commiserated about the state of the world, briefly, and then he asked me if I’d been to the Flower Piano program at the San Francisco Botanical Garden yet. He said he’d just been, and that after one of the professional performers finished her set, a few of the people milling around took turns playing. One played David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” singing softly under his breath. Another, a child of about ten, played a classical sonata, with astonishing beauty. There’s still art here, he said […]

Continue Reading

ZYZZYVA Interview Series: Glen David Gold

by Oscar Villalon

Posted on by me

Glen David Gold is the author of the bestselling novels Sunnyside and Carter Beats the Devil. His essays, memoir, journalism and short fiction have appeared in McSweeney’s, Playboy, Tin House, Wired, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Guardian UK, and London Independent. His most recent book is his memoir, I Will Be Complete (Knopf), portions of which first appeared in ZYZZYVA No. 100 and No. 108. In late June, Gold discussed his new book with Managing Editor Oscar Villalon at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. […]

Continue Reading

A Selection of the Writing You’ll Find in our Spring Issue No. 112

by ZYZZYVA Staff

Posted on by editor

Here’s a sampling of some of the writing in Issue No. 112, which you can get today with a subscription to ZYZZYVA: San Francisco Loved Us Once, an essay by JOSHUA MOHR: We stampeded to this magnificent speck known as San Francisco because we were too queer, too punk, too arty. We were the wrong color or born with the wrong genitalia. We were too fat or too tattooed or too sick or our own family simply despised us. Other places, we were easy targets. We were gristle trapped in a bully’s teeth. So we flocked here because it called to us, San […]

Continue Reading

Creating Tintypes at the Skate Park: Q&A with Photographer Jenny Sampson

by

Posted on by me

Using an anachronistic 4×5 view camera—the kind where the photographer stands draped under a dark cloth—Jenny Sampson has been steadily creating tin-type portraits of skateboarders she encounters at local skate parks, mainly in California, Oregon, and Washington. The resulting portraits are beguilingly fraught with melancholy atmospherics, their distressed tactility an implicit rebuke to the sterile, antiseptic images saturating daily life in a digital age. (Several such tin-types were recently featured in ZYZZYVA No. 111.) Sampson’s practice has allowed her to meaningfully engage with the skaters themselves, and obliquely teach them a bit about her antique photographic technique. (Paradoxically, the process […]

Continue Reading

Become a Member-Level Donor and Get a Copy of Fred Lyon’s ‘San Francisco Noir’

by me

Posted on by me

If you make a Member-level donation of $100 to ZYZZYVA before the end of the year, do we have a nice surprise for you. We’ll send you a copy of acclaimed photographer Fred Lyon’s gorgeous San Francisco Noir, published by Princeton Architectural Press, for free. But we have a limited supply of books, so don’t delay! Just enter SFNOIR in the “Write a note” field on the donation page to receive your copy. All of our Member-level donors also get a complimentary four-issue subscription to ZYZZYVA and have their generosity acknowledged by name in both the journal and on our website. […]

Continue Reading

Illness Ends a Career, Spurs Another: Q&A with ‘Hard to Grip’ Author Emil DeAndreis

by

Posted on by me

Emil DeAndreis’s memoir, Hard to Grip (310 pages; Schaffner Press), is delivered in five stages, which is fitting, because in many ways this book of baseball and chronic illness is a grief memoir. DeAndreis begins jubilantly with his story of a promising high school career, becomes absurdist when he arrives at the University of Hawaii-Hilo, and then takes a sharp, dark turn as he is confronted with an unlikely diagnosis: rheumatoid arthritis. DeAndreis, 23 and preparing to pitch professionally in Belgium, must reckon with the end of his career because of a disease that most commonly affects middle-aged women. The […]

Continue Reading

What Memories (and We) Are Really Made of: ‘Void Star’ by Zachary Mason

by

Posted on by me

The crux of speculative fiction is not always found in inventing new worlds but in skewing our own. Zachary Mason’s Void Star (385 pages; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) does just that, chronicling the struggle of its misfit characters as they fight to survive on an Earth in which the oceans have risen and threaten to submerge the majority of the planet’s remaining landmass. As affluent technocrats revel in their riches atop skyscrapers, the poorest of society are corralled into filthy favelas below them. Nowhere is this stark divide epitomized better than Mason’s meticulously rendered version of San Francisco, a lurid […]

Continue Reading

An Upended Life Amid an Upended City: ‘Meantime’ by Katharine Noel

by

Posted on by me

Meantime (288 pages; Black Cat/Grove) is an absorbing novel, the second from author Katharine Noel, whose first book, Halfway House, received widespread acclaim. Meantime seems to be on a similar track, as reviewers praise its humor and emotional depth—especially as found in its narrator, Claire Hood. Claire is dry and amusing, and her voice and reactions are engaging and convincing. The main plot points—Claire growing up with her bohemian “Naked Family,” her varied boyfriends and failed relationships, her marriage to Jeremy, and Jeremy’s illness and recovery, et cetera —are all fascinating; the characters and their dialogues drive the novel. There […]

Continue Reading