Product Description

In her debut 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. The title story describes a Yale freshman's alienation as a black, motherless loner trying to come to terms with her radically unfamiliar surroundings. 'Speaking in Tongues' follows 14-year-old church girl Tia as she runs away to the big city in search of the mother who abandoned her, and 'The Ant of the Self' features a bright young man's last-ditch attempt to understand his loser father on a trip to the Million Man March in Washington DC. 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. ZZ Packer is the real thing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #554365 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

O: The Oprah Magazine
ZZ Packer is a writer whose voice sounds thrillingly new and different.

The New York Times Book Review
Superb.

Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture
What a wonderfully frank, funny, fearliess writer ZZ Packer is.

Customer Reviews

Packer packs a punch
It's no surprise that they have got a Zadie Smith quote at the back of this book - ZZ Packer (cool name or what!) hasn't just got zeds in her name, she's also a young, black woman who has graduated from an elite university. But that's about it when it comes to similarities between the two of them. ZZ Packer writes tense little stories about people on the outskirts, and she's got that gift of making you believe in everything she tells you. I caught myself thinking "this must be autobiographical" during most of the stories - which is of course impossible, unless ZZ has been reincarnated as a whole bunch of people.

Normally, I wouldn't read short stories, but this book has made me change my mind. The different stories form a whole - they transmit an atmosphere of run-down West Coast US cities that is so real, it almost plays like a film.

The language is mostly straight-forward - she doesn't do all those sorts of twists and gimmicks that Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer or Zadie Smith (sorry, her again) play around with. It's far from being boring though: every so often, the language is shot through with spot-on metaphors or vivid imagery. The mini-storylines don't have a really clear structure and still they keep your interest throughout, which I thought was brilliant. I mean, life doesn't really have a clear-cut structure, does it? So why should stories about life do? The fact that ZZ doesn't hammer in her point makes it only more effective - you know, understatement rather than hyperbole.

The first story, about a girl-scout camp, is probably the most conventional one in the book. Highlights for me were Our Lady of the Peace (a young woman trying to teach in a inner-city school), Geese (down and out in Tokyo), Speaking in Tongues (a religious small-town girl goes to Atlanta in search of her drug-addict mum) and... OK, better stop before I mention them all.

What can I say? Read this book, just do, it's a great experience. Oh, I almost forgot, here's my little joke: ZZ won't give you the zeds. Hehe.

read this now!
These are a collection of wonderful and unpretentious stories. They are so lucid, and don't ooze with metaphors and similes like other novels, but are embellished by them, seamlessly woven in by this fantastic energetic new writer. This is one of those few books that defies genre, not in its obtuseness but in its simplicity, it seems that writers are learning to just tell good, clever stories again

Sky-high expectations and it did not disappoint
I had heard/read nothing but good things about this book and so, inevitably, expected to be let down. It would be too hard for it to match up to the glowing praise it had received.
But, no, it is superb. Brilliant. I read the first fifty pages after opening it to read the acknowledgements... didn't even notice I was turning pages. It sucked me in from the start. It is incredibly easy to read - not due to simplicity but due to the writer's unforced facility with language.
I hope ZZ writes more. Much more.