Synopses & Reviews
Fiction. In the process of constantly disappearing, the unhinged, unmoored and unnamed narrator of WHERE I STAY travels through a cracked North America, stalked by his own future self and the whispers of a distant love. From Arco, Idaho, to Mexico City, he flees along the highways and dirt roads of a landscape filled with characters in transition: squatters, survivalists, prostitutes, drug runners, skinheads, border guards and con-men. WHERE I STAY is a meditation on desperation, identity, geography, memory, and love--a story about endurance, about the empty spaces in ourselves, about the new possibilities we find only after we have lost everything. "Refreshing, pitch-perfect kind of steering that is innovative not only for the genre it might get called into, but for experiential and language-focused texts of every stripe"--Blake Butler. "A gifted journey through borderlands between text and image, glassy prose and suggestively indirect prose poem, facts and fictions, sanity and the other thing"--Lance Olsen.
Review
"Consider Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay a loose retelling of Werner Herzog's 1974 march from Munich to Paris to try to save a dying friend — only set in the arid, ominous nowherescape of the contemporary Southwest and composed by a strung-out W.G. Sebald. Zornoza dedicates the book to 'all those he's lied to' before prosecuting a narrative in stark photographs and crisp, lurid text that will make you wish we had more liars like him in the world." Matthew Derby, author of Super Flat Times
Review
"A gifted journey through borderlands between text and image, glassy prose and suggestively indirect prose poem, facts and fictions, sanity and the other thing, but most of all those borderlands crossed and recrossed on the West's back roads — the kind that always exist just off the grid, just below the radar, and always in beautiful pieces." Lance Olsen, author of nine novels including Anxious Pleasures, Nietzsche's Kisses, and Girl Imagined by Chance
Review
"Refreshing, pitch-perfect kind of steering that is innovative not only for the genre it might get called into, but for experiential and language-focused texts of every stripe." Blake Butler
Review
"Zornoza's stories sprawl across landscapes, sift through details with a syntactical sieve, and revel in minutiae; superfluous exposition is replaced by evocative gestures, bland dialogue surrenders to resonant internal monologue. Consider Where I Stay a road map that carefully marks its scorched landscapes and anonymous small towns while also pointing out the desultory crew of squatters, border guards, prostitutes, drug dealers — transitory figures all — who live hardscrabble lives within them. As such, Zornoza is as much a novelist as he is a cartographer of loneliness, doubt, and fear, one that fearlessly delineates the stark realms of disappointment, unrequited love, and unfulfilled dreams." John Madera, Rain Taxi (Read the entire )
Synopsis
In the process of constantly disappearing, the unhinged, unmoored and unnamed narrator of
Where I Stay travels through a cracked North America, stalked by his own future self and the whispers of a distant love. From Arco, Idaho to Mexico City, he flees along the highways and dirt roads of a landscape filled with characters in transition: squatters, survivalists, prostitutes, drug runners, skinheads, border guards and con-men.
Where I Stay is a meditation on desperation, identity, geography, memory, and love — a story about endurance, about the empty spaces in ourselves, about the new possibilities we find only after we have lost everything.
Synopsis
Where I Stay is a meditation on desperation, identity, geography, memory, and love.
About the Author
Andrew Zornoza is a visual artist and writer born in Houston, Texas and now residing in Brooklyn. His fiction and essays have appeared in magazines such as Sleepingfish, Confrontation, Porcupine Literary Arts, CapGun, Matter Magazine, Gastronomica and H.O.W. He can be found teaching writing at The New School University and fiction at Gotham Writer's Workshop.