ZZ Packer
Named one of the writers to watch in Book magazine's special "Newcomers" issue, ZZ Packer is quickly becoming known as a literary wunderkind with a talent for writing short fiction that goes a long way, as is evident in her debut collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.
ZZ Packer's stories have appeared in The New Yorker (where she was launched as a debut writer), Harper�s. Her short stories have been published in The Best American Short Stories, and have been read on NPR's Selected Shorts. Packer is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. A graduate of Yale, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the Writing Seminar at Johns Hopkins University, she has been a Wallace Stegner-Truman Capote fellow at Stanford University, where she is currently a Jones Lecturer.
| Also Known As:
Zuwena Packer (birth name) Current Home: Pacifica, California Date of Birth: January 12, 1973 Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois |
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Education: B.A., Yale University, 1994; M.A., Johns Hopkins University, 1995; M.F.A., University of Iowa, 1999 Awards: Rona Jaffe Writers Foundation Grant, 1997; Ms. Giles Whiting Award, 1999; Bellingham Review Award for the short story �Brownies,� 1999 source: B&N.com |
Drinking Coffee
Elsewhere
Click to order via Amazon
by ZZ Packer
ISBN: 1573222348
Pub. Date: February 2003
Format: Hardcover, 256pp
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Already an award-winning writer, ZZ Packer now shares with us her long-awaited debut, 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. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decide where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream. With penetrating insight that belies her youth -- she was only nineteen years old when Seventeen magazine printed her first published story -- ZZ Packer helps us see the world with a clearer vision. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking performance -- fresh, versatile, and captivating. It introduces us to an arresting and unforgettable new voice.
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