Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

A black, motherless loner tries to come to terms with her radically unfamiliar surroundings as a Yale freshman; 14-year-old church girl Tia runs away to the big city; a bright young man makes a last-ditch attempt to understand his loser father on the Million Man March in Washington DC; at summer camp, an all-black Brownie troop decide to teach a troop of white Brownies a lesson for a racial insult they think they overheard. Teeming with life, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a collection that explores what it is to be human. Never neatly resolved, these provocative and unforgettable stories resonate with honesty and wry humour and introduce us to a major new talent.

About the Author :
ZZ Packer is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and was selected for the New Yorker's summer fiction debut issue in 2002. She was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists in 2007, and her collection of stories, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, was a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of a Commonwealth Club Fiction award. A graduate of Yale, she has been a Wallace Stegner-Truman Capote fellow and a Jones lecturer at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harpers, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review and Salon. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area. @zzpacker

Review :
She writes a short story with more complexity and kindness that most people can muster in their creaking 500 page novels. It is the kind of brilliance for narrative that should make her peers envious and her readers very, very grateful If Toni Morrison has given black America back its history, ZZ Packer will shed light on its contemporary life. Serious and contentious, she never loses hold of the craft and delight of storytelling. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere has done its work: it has established a voice that will want to be heard again Funny, tender, gripping, wise and the work of a writer seemingly at the top of her game, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is hopefully only the start of a marvellous writing career for ZZ Packer and a delightful reading odyssey for her readers of whom, if there is any justice, there will be many ZZ Packer tells it like it izz . . . her range is wide; her prose is vivid and often comic . . . her vision sizzles and fizzes I don't think I can remember where I last encountered a debut collection that so justified its existence, that buzzed with so much credibility and attitude . . . You finish the book with a mad sense that, in writing, anything is possible Brilliant prose. Unforgettable characters. Eight short stories. All by ZZ Packer. You do the math Superb Moments of deep poignancy combine with flickers of humour to make her stories both touching and astute . . . This is a consistently remarkable book, in both its imagination and the wonderful quality of the writing. It is some of the best new fiction to emerge in recent years - moving, insightful, funny and with real integrity. Packer will be one of the literary shining stars of the future, and rightly so Acerbic, satirical, hilarious, nuanced, as fiercely unsentimental and deliciously subtle as Jane Austen Packer casts an eye both humorous and merciless upon her characters, putting them, in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor, to tests of faith, family, friendship, love, and self that can approach almost Biblical dimensions