Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
An outstanding debut story
collection, Z.Z. Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere has attracted as
much book-world buzz as a triple espresso. Yet, surprisingly, there are no
gimmicks in these eight stories. Their combination of tenderness, humor, and
apt, unexpected detail set them apart. In the title story (published in the
New Yorker's summer 2000 Debut Fiction
issue), a Yale freshman is sent to a psychotherapist who tries to get
her--black, bright, motherless, possibly lesbian--to stop "pretending," when
she is sure that "pretending" is what got her this far. "Speaking in
Tongues" describes the adventures of an Alabama church girl of 14 who takes
a bus to Atlanta to try to find the mother who gave her up. Looking around
the Montgomery Greyhound station, she wonders if it has changed much since
the Reverend King's days. She "tried to imagine where the 'Colored' and
'Whites Only' signs would have hung, then realized she didn't have to. All
five blacks waited in one area, all three whites in another." Packer's prose
is wielded like a kitchen knife, so familiar to her hand that she could use
it with her eyes shut. This is a debut not to miss. --Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
The clear-voiced humanity of
Packer's characters, mostly black teenage girls, resonates unforgettably
through the eight stories of this accomplished debut collection. Several
tales are set in black communities in the South and explore the identity
crises of God-fearing, economically disenfranchised teens and young women.
In the riveting "Speaking in Tongues," 14-year-old "church girl" Tia runs
away from her overly strict aunt in rural Georgia in search of the mother
she hasn't seen in years. She makes it to Atlanta, where, in her long
ruffled skirt and obvious desperation, she seems an easy target for a
smooth-talking pimp. The title story explores a Yale freshman's wrenching
alienation as a black student who, in trying to cope with her new, radically
unfamiliar surroundings and the death of her mother, isolates herself
completely until another misfit, a white student, comes into her orbit.
Other stories feature a young man's last-ditch effort to understand his
unreliable father on a trip to the Million Man March and a young woman who
sets off for Tokyo to make "a pile of money" and finds herself destitute,
living in a house full of other unemployed gaijin. These stories never end
neatly or easily. Packer knows how to keep the tone provocative and tense at
the close of each tale, doing justice to the complexity and dignity of the
characters and their difficult choices.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Packer's debut collection of
short stories is full of challenges to its youthful, predominantly African
American cast of characters. Often they have everything all figured out when
a "Challenging Person" comes barging in, such as in the book's title story,
in which Dina and her ramen noodles are walled up in self-imposed dorm room
exile until moon-faced Heidi from Vancouver demands her company and,
perhaps, her heart. In another, God himself--speaking through an amputee
blues musician once known as Delta Sweetmeat--infiltrates the already
supposedly holier-than-thou life of Sister Clareese. Sometimes, the
challenge is from a hopeful situation turned frustrating and desperate: a
group of once-idealistic expatriates starving in a one-room apartment in
Japan, for example, or a young city schoolteacher snapping on her drive
home. These challenges don't tend to have happy endings, but they are
learning experiences for the characters and moving reading for us. Packer's
prose suggests university writing-workshop fiction at its insightful best,
full of youthful angst and irreverence, yet polished, professional, and
captivating. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Stephen Dixon, author of
I
She's a heck of a fine writer
of rich, full, psychologically complex stories...and a wry sense of humor...
The San Francisco
Chronicle, March 16, 2003
"[Packer] has a commanding
sense of character and setting,...and often thrilling usage of language and
style."
Glamour
A mature book about growing up
fast from an author who has only begun to write.
O: The Oprah Magazine,
March 2003
[ZZ Packer is] a writer whose
voice sounds thrillingly new and different.
The Baltimore Sun, March
2, 2003
Well-wrought, poignant and
surprising, the gritty grace of this book signals twenty something Packer as
a writer to watch.
The New York Times Book
Review, March 16, 2003
"Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" is
a superb story, its wry and mournful tones bound together by a complex
psychological portrait.
The San Francisco
Chronicle, March 16, 2003
"[Packer] has a commanding
sense of character and setting,...and often thrilling usage of language and
style."
The Chicago Tribune,
March 9, 2003
The writing here is crisp and
weighted with vivid metaphors...
Marie Claire, April 2003
Brilliant prose. Unforgettable
characters. Eight short stories. All by ZZ Packer. You do the math.
USA Today, March 18, 2003
...Packer's stories, by turns astringent, brutally
honest and sometimes funny, offer readers slices of life...
Book Description
With stories in The New
Yorker's debut fiction issue and in The Best American Short Stories,
2000, and as the winner of a Whiting Writers' Award and a Rona Jaffe
Foundation Writers' Award, ZZ Packer has already achieved what most writers
only dream about-all prior to publication of her first book.
Now, in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, her
impressive range and talent are abundantly evident. Packer dazzles with her
command of language-surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and
indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the
periphery, unsure of where they belong. With penetrating insight that belies
her youth-she was only nineteen years old when Seventeen magazine
printed her first published story-Packer takes us to a Girl Scout camp,
where a troupe of black girls are confronted with a group of white girls,
whose defining feature turns out to be not their race but their
disabilities; to the Million Man March on Washington, where a young man must
decide where his allegiance to his father lies; to Japan, where an
international group of drifters find themselves starving, unable to find
work.
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking
debut-fresh, versatile, and captivating. It introduces us to an arresting
and unforgettable new American voice.
About the Author
A New Yorker debut
writer, ZZ Packer has had short stories published in the Best American
Short Stories, 2000 (edited by E. L. Doctorow), the Best American
Short Stories, 2002 (edited by Walter Mosley), Harper's, Story
magazine, and in the anthology 25 and Under: Fiction, as well as a story
read on NPR's "Selected Shorts." A graduate of Yale, the writing seminar at
Johns Hopkins University, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is the
recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers'
Award. She has held Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote fellowships from
Stanford University, where she is currently a Jones Lecturer.
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