"Zumas gives socially awkward, mysteriously gifted and self-destructive
outcasts spellbinding, unflinching voice in her debut collection. The
heroes in this collection are trapped; some are resigned to years of
caregiving, many are institutionalized and nearly all haunt the fringes
of normalcy (or disregard the normal altogether). Each story begins
with a lightning strike into a new consciousness: the first flashes
of a romance over the lunch line in a psych ward in “Waste No
Time if This Method Fails”; a teenager in the title story dreaming
of abandoning his blind parents; the young woman of “The Everything
Hater” living in sustained dread after her brother’s repeated
suicide attempts. There are triumphs, too: a patient in treatment for
an eating disorder exacts revenge on a bully, and an underage groupie
liberates herself from her punk lover’s fabricated fairy tale
world. Zumas captures halfway-house heartbreak as well as moments of
thoughtful, scab-picking solitude. It’s a powerful, irresistible
collection."
—Publishers Weekly
“Attention
unrequited lovers, sisters of suicidal brothers, children of the legally
blind: you are not alone. Leni Zumas understands your quiet agony and
describes it with such a wry, unflinching familiarity that even the
gory details ring true. If darkness has ever been your friend, your
story is in here.”
—Miranda July
“Leni Zumas’s writing is fearless and swift, sassy and sensational.”
—Joy Williams, author of Honored Guest
“I have never read stories like these before and I can’t
get them out of my head. Her language is real sorcery—it dismantles
the world you think you know and takes you to strange, fecund territories
of the imagination. Sentence by sentence, Zumas creates worlds so vivid
and fever-bright that you forget you’re reading words on a page
and begin to see real plums, scars, black stars lashed to the bottom
of canoes. Her characters are girls and boys in bad trouble, who feel
as close to you and as far from you as the black sheep in your own family.”
—Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised
by Wolves
“Leni Zumas is a wonder, an alchemist, a witch. She brews a wild
elixir in these stories, which take you where you never thought to go.
Here is the body unspooling and nibbled at, the body undone and made
fast again with the strength of the wish to be loved. Something’s
timely in these stories and hip, and yet they let us fall out of time.
Fall into sorrow and be lifted again. What a blessing—to succumb
to Zumas’s power, to these gorgeous, beguiling songs.”
—Noy Holland, author of What Begins with Bird
A girl
impetuously escapes the stagnation of her small-town life by running
away with a rock star out of a dark fairytale, only to find herself
caught in the new tedium of his narcissism.
A son of independent but naïve blind parents, struggling to decide
whether to leave home for college, discovers his mother hitting on his
new best friend.
A boy thinks he can save his sister from the clutches of an abusive
boyfriend and a dead-end life when a witch comes to town promising an
anti-love charm… but he finds she’s just a stray like him,
an unfulfilled wife who flees the confines of her straight-edged life
by indulging in gothic fantasy.
A food-service employee in a mental hospital engages in a flirtation
with an inmate.
A young gay man in a half-way house loses everything to the schemes
of a handsome conman.
An older woman fantasizes about a young coworker by day and nurses ailing
wild animals at night.
From forgotten and hopeless places—places that are just ugly,
not quaint, and full of that breed of bully born of boredom and small
ponds—emerge FAREWELL NAVIGATOR’s (Open City Books, June
15, 2008) fragilely defiant protagonists. In the strange yet familiar
American towns where many of these stories are set, adults are largely
absent or incompetent, leaving a population of adolescents to try to
sort things out for themselves, to find meaning without direction. Should
they stay or go? Conform or resist? Whether they leave or not, they
all struggle to hold on to their independence in the face of an overwhelming
pressure to blur, to blend, to merely get by.
Zumas’s characters—young and old alike—weave stories
that will make their choices make sense. Without traditional anchors
of religion, community, or family, they fight to find narratives that
will imbue their lives with the significance they want desperately to
achieve. As one character asks, “Is it from boredom? The need
to build drama where there is actually very little?” In one voice,
Zumas’s characters would answer with a quick but insecure, “No.”
Her characters cling to the promise that there is much more than very
little out there to be found, if only they knew where to look.
Zumas seamlessly blends the fantastic and the mundane, sweeping the
reader into world both surreal and ordinary. As FAREWELL NAVIGATOR proves,
Zumas is a new voice in American fiction that deserves attention. She
perfectly describes in engaging prose and keen dialogue both the cynicism
and heavily guarded optimism that characterize this age. After traveling
through America’s shadows and discovering not only desolation
but also unexpected hope, readers will finish FAREWELL NAVIGATOR with
that sense of pleasant disequilibrium that follows any great journey.
Leni Zumas's fiction has recently appeared in Open City, Quarterly West,
and New Orleans Review. She is a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award
for Short Fiction. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts–Amherst
MFA program, she teaches writing at Hunter College and plays drums in
the Brooklyn post-punk band S-S-S-Spectres.
Leni Zumas will be available for interviews upon the release of the
book. For more information on FAREWELL NAVIGATOR and/or to schedule
an interview, please contact Adam Rifenberick, Press Box Publicity,
via email at Adam@PressBoxPublicity.com or by calling 716.741.8495.
Title: FAREWELL NAVIGATOR
Author: Leni Zumas
Publisher: Open City Books
Format: Paperback, 170 pages
Retail Price: $14.00
ISBN 10: 1890447498
ISBN 13: 978-1890447496
Publication date: June 15, 2008
Cover
art by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs
Cover Design by Nick Stone
Author photo by Dawn Fredericks
Book
Tour (check back for additional dates, to be added soon)
Wednesday,
May 28, 7pm
Open City KGB Reading Series
with Christine Schutt
KGB
Bar
85 E. 4th Street
New York City 10003
212.625.9048
Saturday, June
14, 6pm
Politics and Prose Bookstore
5015 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20008
202.364.1919
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