Tag Archives: Zyzzyva Magazine

Zyzzyva Magazine – WINTER 2025-2026

ZYZZYVA Magazine: The latest issue features…

Nonfiction

“The Fighters” by Joe Donnelly: on being transplanted as a boy from New Jersey to Ireland, and the grim school days spent at Willow Park primary school in Dublin.

“Fire Watching” by Harmony Holiday: a mediation on Los Angeles, its devastating fires, and finding meaning.

“The Deer” by Raia Small: “I have never killed anyone, so I can say that I don’t understand. But I am getting to know my own cruelties …”

Fiction

“A Long Line of Violence” by Tomas Moniz: A duo travels from the Mission District to Lassen Volcanic National Park to return a rifle to its battleground.

“Plums” by Feroz Rather: A young man steals as much time as he can with his beloved among the orchards and buses of his town in Kashmir.

“Viable” by Suzanne Rivecca: “The person I call in situations like this is Colette, the city government version of me, an abstinent ex-junkie disliked by the mayor, with a soft spot for schizophrenics, a love for lancing abscesses, and zero work/life balance.”

Poetry

Brian Ang, Nica Giromini, Kelly Gray, Michael Kennedy Costa, Kayla Krut, Maw Shein Win, Jared Stanley, and John Yau.

In Conversation

Chris Feliciano Arnold talks to Venezuelan scholar, journalist, and poet Boris Muñoz about literature, authoritarianism, and the importance of cronistas.

Literary Arts: Zyzzyva Magazine – Fall 2023

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ZYZZYVA Magazine Fall 2023: In This Issue:

Fiction
“Thinking Ahead” by Joan Silber:
“How does a person behave when he knows he’s dying? There’s a myth that people go off and do what they’ve always wanted to do—sail to Spain, buy a horse, eat at the world’s most famous restaurant. ‘They never do that,’ my mother said, ‘that I’ve seen. They don’t even remember why they wanted to do it.”

“Seabreeze” by Korey Lewis:
Jojo and Jaz wait for The Defendant to pick them up from their mother’s place and take them to Seabreeze. “If Disney is where dreams come true, then Seabreeze is where they give up.”

“Eau de Nil” by Chloe Wilson:
“It was a website called Geriatrix. On it were women my age, in various states of undress. I saw breasts droopier and flatter than mine, necks that were crêpier, bellies that bulged and hung. But what really struck me was how happy they looked.”

“Country Furnishings” by Earle McCartney:
The equilibrium in a tetchy blue-collar workshop gets jostled with the arrival of Frank Wonderwood—future son-in-law of the business’s new co-owner and future woodworking graduate from Del Tech.

Poetry
Karen Leona AndersonStuart DybekJohanna Carissa FernandezMike GoodCleo QianSarah Lynn RogersJoel M. Toledo

Nonfiction
Laura M. Furlan her birth parents, identity, and butterflies. Adam Foulds on the home-turned-museum of one of England’s greatest architects, Sir John Soane. Sam McPhee on the singular fascination hands have on his attention. Jessica Francis Kane on her lifelong affinity with the fascinating James Boswell. And Devon Brody’s “Beth”: “I’m glad to be with only Beth and her long hair that meets the hair on my arms, and the hair on her arms that meets the hair on my arms.”

In Conversation:
Ricardo Frasso Jaramillo delves with Justin Torres into Torres’s career and his new novel, Blackouts, a finalist for the National Book Award.

Art
Wangari Mathenge

Literary Arts: Zyzzyva Magazine – Spring 2023

ZYZZYVA Magazine Spring 2023:

Fiction

  • The Mysteries of the Universe by Anna Badkhen:
    “I see now what this is about. I’m a professor and author in America, she’s in a war zone: to her, I’m rich and happy. How is she supposed to know about the cancer, the medical debt, Ksyusha’s student loans? So, I try to deflect.”
  • Encyclopedia of Botany by Jane Marchant:
    A daughter’s closely observed catalog of the flora around her Bay Area home, and of her family’s complex history of identity.
  • Glint of Sport by Angie Sijun Lou:
    “I don’t know if this story is true. You can’t divide truth from kitsch in this place…”
  • Eulogy by William Hawkins:
    In the wake of a funeral, a dead father’s legacy hangs over his surviving adult sons as they trudge into the lukewarm waters of the lake by the family pier.
  • The Eye by Elodie Saint-Louis:
    “When Theo spoke, she thought, you could see all of these places on his body. Vyros, Hymettus, Loutro, Parnitha. The land was in him. It was the river running out of his mouth. The words that bumped into each other gently but never spilled over, petering out into a gentle sway.”
  • Plus more fiction by Perry Janes, David Hayden (there be strange happenings in a dilapidated insurance building in Chicago), and Wendy Elizabeth Wallace.

Nonfiction

  • Jane Marchant on the flora around her Bay Area home—and her family’s complex history of identity.

Poetry

  • Jason Allen-Paisant, Dan Alter, Allison Benis White, Ricardo Cázares, E.G. Cunningham, Peter LaBerge, Joyce Mansour, Maria Zoccola

Art

  • Sofia Bonati