Blog – Page 34 of 116

‘Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror’: A Great Escape

by Cade Johnson

November 20, 2020

Posted on November 20, 2020 (November 19, 2020) by Zack Ravas

2020, with all its horrors, may have given Halloween a run for its money this time around. The holiday’s circumstances themselves this year are scary enough to substantiate a scary story—kids stuck at home with parents, or otherwise risking an uptick in COVID-19 transmission by taking part in the festivities. Some who prefer to consume more uplifting content in troubling times may find the book ill-fitted for 2020, but if like me horror is a genre you hold near and dear, Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror (Catapult; 289 pages; edited by Lincoln Michel & Nadxieli Nieto) is a […]

‘Wave If You Can See Me’ by Susan Ludvigson: The Water We Must All Cross

by Corinne Leong

November 16, 2020

Posted on November 16, 2020 (November 13, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Susan Ludvigson’s latest poetry collection, Wave If You Can See Me (72 pages; Red Hen Press), written in the wake of her husband’s death from long-term illness, is not a narrative of violent, all-consuming grief nor of its resulting numbness. Rather, it is a quiet depiction of longing and inquiry that waxes and wanes, from the perspective of a woman who has prepared extensively for loss. In its restraint, the collection attempts to answer seemingly ineffable questions: Can we know grief before it touches us? Can we begin to interrogate death if we haven’t inhabited it? Ludvigson’s poems are quiet […]

‘Leave the World Behind’ by Rumaan Alam: On the Precipice of Disaster

by Nessa Ordukhani

November 10, 2020

Posted on November 10, 2020 (November 9, 2020) by Zack Ravas

When Amanda and Clay rent a house in the Hamptons with their kids, Rose and Archie, they expect a pleasant family trip and time away from the city. But before they can fully enjoy their rental home, a late-night knock on the door floods their holiday with a new reality of growing fear and unknowable terror. Standing in the doorway under the cover of darkness are the owners of the rental home, G.H and Ruth Washington, whose surprising arrival they claim is prompted by a widespread blackout in New York City. Unable to connect with news sources, or ascertain any […]

‘Best Debut Short Stories 2020: The PEN America Dau Prize’: The Ties That Bind

by Cade Johnson

November 6, 2020

Posted on November 6, 2020 (November 11, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Each year, Catapult publishes an anthology of the twelve recipients of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, which highlights writers who demonstrate exceptional talent in their first published short stories. In this year’s installment, Best Debut Short Stories 2020: The PEN America Dau Prize (240 pages; Catapult), editor Yuka Igarashi’s introduction observes that the un-ignorable presence and impact of money unites the collection. But reading through these stories, it’s hard not to focus, perhaps as a result of the pandemic’s transformation of the ways we socialize, on the stories’ exploration of group dynamics, as well as […]

‘Antkind’ by Charlie Kaufman: One Very Long Laugh

by Colton Alstatt

November 4, 2020

Posted on November 4, 2020 (October 30, 2020) by Zack Ravas

As a screenwriter and director, Charlie Kaufman has won acclaim for movies like Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York—but not from film critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, the protagonist of Kaufman’s new avant-garde romp, Antkind (705 Pages; Penguin Random House), who, in a meta twist, maligns the author time and again, often before B. is hit by a bicyclist, or buried beneath an avalanche of books, or falls into a manhole. (He does that a lot.). Reading Antkind is a bodily thing, so full is it of gut and heart. For once, the cliché […]

‘Bestiary’ by K-Ming Chang: Dark of the Mind

by Corinne Leong

November 2, 2020

Posted on November 2, 2020 (October 30, 2020) by Zack Ravas

From Plath to Vuong, the poet-novelist has long been a centerpiece of literary conversation, subverting convention to craft impossibly engaging narratives. K-Ming Chang, a poet by precedent, comes prepared to contribute to that legacy. Her first novel, Bestiary (272 Pages; One World/Random House), is suffused with lyricism, a multigenerational, mythological, and magical-realist retelling of one family’s fraught history. Bestiary’s three narrators are referred to only as Daughter, Mother, and Grandmother. Their narratives are interwoven, and converse and collapse upon each other. Though Chang’s novel is largely lyric and non-linear, its through-line is deceptively simple: Daughter learns the myth of Hu Gu Po—a […]

Photisms

by Juan Pablo Villalobos

October 30, 2020

Posted on October 30, 2020 (October 30, 2020) by Zack Ravas

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 […]

ZYZZYVA Staff Recommends October 2020: What to Read, Watch, & Listen to

by ZYZZYVA Staff

October 28, 2020

Posted on October 28, 2020 (October 30, 2020) by Zack Ravas

As October draws to an end, it’s difficult to imagine what form Halloween will take in this era of social distancing (and a tad difficult to focus on such festivities with Election Day looming), which might be why we’re forgoing our usual brand of holiday-themed staff picks. But that doesn’t mean we’re lacking in reading and viewing material to recommend this month—far from it!—so without further ado: Corinne Leong, Intern: I knew Luca Guadagnino’s new miniseries was for me the moment the main character began to wax lyrical about Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds while lying in a skiff in […]

The L.A. Issue

by ZYZZYVA

October 24, 2020

Posted on October 24, 2020 (April 6, 2021) by ZYZZYVA

ZYZZYVA Volume 36, #2, Fall–Winter 2020 (No. 119) - Day and Night Versions

The L.A. Issue. Fiction: Ray Bradbury, Siel Ju, Jonathan Escoffery, Perry Janes, Francisco González, Andrés Reconco, Kathleen Mackay, and Michelle Latiolais. Nonfiction: A. Kendra Greene, Wendy C. Ortiz, Steve Ryfle, and David L. Ulin. Interview: Steve Ryfle talks to the late Wanda Coleman. Poetry: Victoria Chang, David Hernandez, Genevieve Kaplan, Douglas Manuel, Dan Murphy, and Mary Otis. Art: Henry Lara. You can purchase a copy of No. 119 here, or order a subscription to ZYZZYVA now. […]

‘Just Us: An American Conversation’ by Claudia Rankine: Confronting White Silence

by Cade Johnson

October 23, 2020

Posted on October 23, 2020 (October 22, 2020) by Zack Ravas

The title of Claudia Rankine’s new collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation (352 pages; Graywolf Press), alludes to a Richard Pryor quote from a 1979 stand-up routine about the criminal justice system: “You go down there looking for justice, that’s what you find, just us.” The quote is just as potent now as it was then, with mass incarceration making prisons disproportionately Black, and relevant to Rankine’s stance as she confronts white silence and privilege. But the title also evokes community, a sense of a unified “us,” as well as the more private “us” that exists when we […]

‘Straight from the Horse’s Mouth’ by Meryem Alaoui: Vivid and Vividly Angry

by Michelle Latiolais

October 21, 2020

Posted on October 21, 2020 (October 20, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth (304 pages; Other Press; translated by Emma Ramadan) was originally published in French as La vérité sort de la bouche du cheval by Éditions Gallimard, Paris, in 2018. One reads a tremendous amount of work in translation these days, and it is a bounty, what translators make possible for us. I am forever grateful, and particularly, most recently, for this first novel by the Moroccan-born writer Meryem Alaoui. The novel is a vivid, and vividly angry, first-person portrait of Jmiaa, now thirty-four, but forced into prostitution by her destitute husband before she is twenty. Jmiaa […]

Passion Tempered with Patience: An Interview with Paul Yamazaki

by Stephen Sparks

October 19, 2020

Posted on October 19, 2020 (October 19, 2020) by Zack Ravas

Paul Yamazaki made me want to be a bookseller. When I met Paul, I’d been working in bookstores for fifteen years, but it wasn’t until getting to know him and seeing just how established and comfortable he was with his place in the publishing ecosystem that I began to find a similar comfort myself. At the time, I was working as a manager and book buyer at Green Apple Books on Clement Street, and have since, at the beginning of 2017, become with my wife the owner of Point Reyes Books. Paul has been at City Lights Bookstore for nearly […]