![]() 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. ![]() Already an award-winning writer, ZZ Packer now shares with us her debut, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Chosen by John Updike as a Today Show Book Club Pick. Regina Marler About the Author:īook Description Paperback. 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. She "tried to imagine where the 'Colored' and 'Whites Only' signs would have hung, then realized she didn't have to. Looking around the Montgomery Greyhound station, she wonders if it has changed much since the Reverend King's days. ![]() "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. 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. Their combination of tenderness, humor, and apt, unexpected detail set them apart. Yet, surprisingly, there are no gimmicks in these eight stories. Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere has attracted as much book-world buzz as a triple espresso. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.Īn outstanding debut story collection, Z.Z. It introduces us to an arresting and unforgettable new voice. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking performance-fresh, versatile, and captivating. 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. ![]() 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 decides 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. Raeburn gives an opinionated statement that Dina is “having a crisis of identity” (p.117).Chosen by John Updike as a Today Show Book Club Pick.Īlready an award-winning writer, ZZ Packer now shares with us her debut, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. They may be wayward but they are essentially good - honest and funny and scathing.”(2004)I do not consider Dina as basically a violent character but there are certain tight knots in her personality which she is unable to loosen. Moreover, such incidents will remain as the permanent blots in the books on the racial history of America.The inner worlds of both Dina and Heidi are portraits of innocence but the former suffers from the consequences of her neglected upbringing with other disadvantages, and the latter is the victim of circumstances.Ĭommenting on Packer’s stories Julie Myerson writes, “What they have in common is that they're grafting away on the edge, struggling to fit in, to decide or define for them who or what they are. The combustible younger generation of African Americans, including females will cut loose from the mainstream discipline of the society and engulf the societal values like an avalanche causing enormous damage which may take a long time to heal. She is molested by one of the so-called holy men, Deacon McCreedy, and she hates him. Dina confesses “Until that moment I'd been good in all the ways that were meant to matter.Suddenly I was hard-bitten and recalcitrant, the kind of kid that took pleasure in sticking pins into cats” (Packer, 2003, p.106) In “Every Tongue Shall Confess”, one of the important themes ingrained in the characterization of Sister Clareese, a choir member of Greater Christ Emmanuel Pentecostal Church of the Fire Baptized, who is also a nurse, is how she has to challenge religious hypocrisy and sexual exploitation of her religious faith. It is the spontaneous overflow of dark, suppressed emotions. Her response is neither willful nor it has any hidden agenda.
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