Zyzzyva Magazine
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ZYZZYVA is a critically acclaimed print journal, introducing readers to new work from the best contemporary writers and artists since 1985. Based in San Francisco, we have established a vigorous tradition of finding and fostering new talent, in our backyard and beyond. For over thirty years ZYZZYVA has nurtured emerging writers, many of whom go on to spectacular careers (Haruki Murakami, Po Bronson, F.X. Toole, Kay Ryan, Sherman Alexie) and whose work in ZYZZYVA is recognized by the Pushcart Prize, the Best American series, the O. Henry Prize Stories, and other awards organizations. Recent contributors include Rivka Galchen, Ron Carlson, Ruth Madievsky, Lou Mathews, Lori Ostlund, Kaveh Akbar, Fatima Bhutto, Peter Orner, Ann Cummins, Octavio Solis, Glen David Gold, Amy Tan, and Matthew Dickman. Source
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| Scope | National |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Country | United States of America |
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Recent Articles
Search ArticlesOn ‘Front Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia’ by Brian Barth
The Bay Area was a groundswell for experiments in communal living during the 1960s and ’70s. Few would associate the utopian spirit of those projects, which were often motivated by the desire to leave the city and its ills, with the urban encampments that have come to shape the region’s public landscape in more recent years.
Life Without a Narrator
Popular novels about the internet tend to deride, explicitly or not, a certain perceived generational disaffectedness. “We don’t want to do anything challenging, such as what living requires,” declares the narrator of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts. Instead, we––meaning mostly younger Millennials with jobs and social lives inextricable from the internet––want to live in an effortless and lifeless montage of familiar images.
Sharing Strange Ghosts: Reflections on Jack Spicer at Berkeley
It felt very fitting to launch Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters at Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2025) at UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall. The campus was a key location for the California poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) at the bookends of his poetic career. Spicer would designate his arrival at Berkeley in 1946 as the year of his birth.
A Map of Desire: Thomas Dai’s Take My Name but Say It Slow: Essays
In Thomas Dai’s essay collection Take My Name but Say It Slow (288 pages; Norton), Dai crafts deeply contemplative meditations on growing up Chinese American and navigating queer identity.
Canon Wars Redux: On Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books?
Taste, Naomi Kanakia explains, is one facet of how Great Books shape us. Our ability to appreciate great literature, to “discriminate, to discern fine nuances, and to see what truly exists within an object, versus what we are projecting onto it,” is cultivated by reading classics made timeless by their rigor, honesty, and care.
Inventing a Joan: Q&A With Jake Rose
One poem in Jake Rose’s debut collection JOAN, which was published in April,reads: “sometimes a metaphysical door opens and you just have to / gawk and that’s when your mouth gets wide enough / to speak.” This line is an apt descriptor of the collection itself, which was the winner of the 2026 Phoenix Emerging Poets Book Prize. Collapsing biography and autobiography, the poetry of JOAN explores queer identity, grief, and desire through the life of Joan of Arc.
Issue No. 132 - ZYZZYVA
“Saguaro in the Sea” by Sophia Acuña: on surfing and indigeneity in Southern California, told through collage. “Care Directive” by Sarah Matsui: a daughter’s attempt to keep her aging father in Hawaii from all sorts of calamity, but having to monitor him from the mainland. “Triptych: A Biographer’s Sketchbook” by Carolyn Burke: “The Baroness was lively, curious, and still blond at eighty-five.
Restored to Flight: Fifty Mothers by Preeti Vangani
Preeti Vangani’s searing, sharp Fifty Mothers (67 pages; River River Books) captures the essence of grieving a parent. The linked poems in the collection reach for emotional highs and nadirs; rage makes peace with eros and falls back toward love. The collection, set in Bombay though Vangani now lives in San Francisco, is bookended by pages from the poet’s late mother’s college diaries, the first page taken from 1984-85.
Working Fires: A Look Inside the Life of Hotshots
In 2025, wildfires again broke records. The year began with the Eaton and Palisades fires, and over the course of the year, ten thousand more wildfires burned than the ten-year average. We live in a world where megafires occur with regularity, alongside disasters like the Lahaina, Palisades, and Eaton fires. While we may become inured to political headlines, the again-ness winning out, the proliferation of destructive wildfires continues to increase both in the American psyche and in reality.
After the Quake: Q&A with Nadia Terranova – ZYZZYVA
The author of acclaimed novels that have been translated into many languages, Nadia Terranova is one of the most prominent voices of contemporary Italian literature. In 2020, her first novel translated into English, Farewell Ghosts, was published by Seven Stories Press and was translated by Ann Goldstein (the noted translator of Elena Ferrante). A critical success in Italy, the novel was awarded the Premio Alassio Centolibri and named a finalist for the Premio Strega.