FAREWELL NAVIGATOR
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Farewell Navigator: Stories by Leni Zumas
Female
101 years old
BROOKLYN, New York
United States
Last Login: 10/10/2009
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| Music | Reviews
Zumas gives socially awkward, mysteriously gifted and self-destructive outcasts spellbinding, unflinching voice in her debut... [She] captures halfway-house heartbreak as well as moments of thoughtful, scab-picking solitude. It’s a powerful, irresistible collection.
—Publishers Weekly
...In the same way that Sonic Youth mucked with obscure guitar tunings and still found a way into pop music, Zumas has a knack for telling stories with a familiar ring in a surpassingly strange manner.
—Washington City Paper
It’s a rare writer who can bring us closer to people we might cross the street to avoid.
—LA Weekly
Almost no one does the right thing -- or, at least, the expected thing -- in these stories. You may find them funny (there's just enough humor to keep them upbeat of Carson McCullers), but there's also a very good chance they will unzip you, unsettle you. The language is medieval: part incantation, part Rikki Ducornet. "We were not like the fairy tale, as hard as he'd tried to make it so," thinks a character in "Thieves and Mapmakers." In fact, it is the effort to connect across enormous emotional and intellectual divides that makes these stories recognizable as stories -- more fiction than parable.
—Los Angeles Times
Like powerful music, the phenomenon of Zumas’s fiction happens with the rhythms are perfectly in time with the pitch of loneliness. She pounds away at her words until they make a melancholy sound.
—Paste Magazine
Zumas writes with an uncanny aptitude for the intense visceral thoughts, emotions, compulsions, and reactions that accompany dealing in the realm of daily experience. Her narrators and characters tug at their own skins, enter the anatomies of others, and, from the various parts discovered, voice surreal, poetic expressions that contain true sensations.
—Brooklyn Rail
Leni Zumas can dance very well in a shoebox. It’s a beautiful shoebox. Some dancers lean on the shoebox walls, holding on for gravity, afraid to fall down, because if they were freed and onstage, they know they would collapse; other times, they only begin in shoeboxes, but look forward to the day when they escape, because they will flower and explode. Will she flower or fall down? It’s hard to be sure, but this reviewer looks for flowers. I would be glad to see Leni Zumas onstage.
—New York Observer
FAREWELL NAVIGATOR is a dark jewel.
—The Greenpoint Gazette
Once you start staring into the verbal abyss that is FAREWELL NAVIGATOR, her stunning debut collection of short stories ... you'll be absorbed by a shape-shifting combination of "gory details" and uplifting turning points, by gothic fairytale scenarios blended with the surreal richness of the seemingly mundane. And luckily, you'll occasionally discover some hope and moments of triumphant insights.
—Lodown Magazine
Zumas’s tales are dark but they’re also beautifully written—sparked by some hopeful revelations, like when a good-hearted gargoyle finds some compassion in his cruel tenants. Each short story seems to bleed into the next, making the collection very hard to put down.
—HEEB Magazine |
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FAREWELL NAVIGATOR's Details
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| Status: | Single | | Zodiac Sign: | Leo |
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About me:
FAREWELL NAVIGATOR was published in 2008 by Open City Books
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 wry, unflinching familiarity that even the gory details ring true. If darkness has ever been your friend, your story is in here.
—Miranda July, author of No One Belongs Here More Than You
Leni Zumas’s writing is fearless and swift, sassy and sensational.
—Joy Williams, author of Honored Guest
I have never read stories like Leni Zumas’s 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, Leni 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 are mothers infatuated with astronauts and dragons; here is a girl suckling elvers and owlets. 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
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Who I'd like to meet:
www.lenizumas.com
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