In her introduction to New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008, ZZ Packer, co-editor of the collection, calls the American South “a land of contrasts.” “There’s the sweet tea, and the ...

Rita ushered us out to her deck. Summer’s light was finally here, and although I wouldn’t call it heat, there was warmth to the night air. We filled our mugs with raspberry decaf coffee and added ...

CERTAIN topics in black America are taboo. Things talked about in hushed corners but not publicly acknowledged. Faults of the black church. Black people who are gay and lesbian. Issues surrounding ...

ZZ Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” a surprisingly honest anthology of eight short stories imbued with a masterly command of language, has dazzled, and continues to dazzle, audiences. Packer, ...

Mount Mercy University will welcome acclaimed fiction writer ZZ Packer for a special reading and Q&A on November 9. The Q&A starts at 3:30 p.m. and the reading starts at 7:00 p.m. Both events take ...

ZZ Packer reads Stuart Dybek's "Paper Lantern," and discusses it with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. "Paper Lantern" was published in the November 27, 1995, issue of The New Yorker ...

The current take on writer ZZ Packer as hip, as a fresh voice of the disenfranchised, began edging toward critical mass when the chroniclers of style -- Vogue, Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine, ...

Some of the eight stories in ZZ Packer’s debut collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead), feature ambitious young African-Americans looking to improve their lives: in “Our Lady of Peace” ...

For 17 years, I waited and wondered when Matthew Klam would publish another book. “Sam the Cat,” a collection of stories from 2000, had followed Klam’s selection as part of The New Yorker’s “20 Under ...

I read John Updike’s “Rabbit at Rest” while in Japan, and quickly worked my way backwards to the rest of the “Rabbit” quartet, and eventually through all of Updike’s stories. There seemed to me not ...

The “Best American Short Stories” series may get all the attention, but “New Stories From the South” has published an impressive array of heavyweights since its inception, in 1986—including Rick Bass, ...