Andrew Zornoza
Where I Stay

ISBN: 9780977901913
Fiction | 8"x5", 108 pp, pbk | June 2009
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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.

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

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
    

Reviews of Where I Stay

"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."
—read the full review by Blake Butler, at HTML Giant

"As haunting as it is gritty, Where I Stay has the feel of an impressionist watercolor and underscores the value of the small press in literary culture. Indeed, I hesitate to simply call it a book; its ambitions, beautifully realized, make it a hybrid of textual and visual arts."
—read the full review at Small Press Reviews

"Zornoza’s prose has range, which is what makes this book at times so beautiful and at other times so devastating. . . . Originality, vision, risks, and experimentation to give you back this country as it is: flawed, fractured, hypocritical, greedy, beautiful, breathtaking, mesmerizing, and the constant dialect of a lie and a truth."
—read the full review by Steven Karl, at Lovers' Last Go Around
   

Interviews with Andrew Zornoza

"Writers have been bending fact and fiction for quite a while. I’m not quite sure where this mania to discover the exact point the ride starts and stops comes from. . . . I’ve spent some time living in a van, sure. Who hasn’t? Living in your car seemed déclassé at one point. Now that we’ve learned that Raymond Carver and Vladimir Nabakov preferred to write while sitting in parked cars, it’s less of a trespass."
—read the full interview at Bookish Us
   

Excerpts from Where I Stay

About Andrew Zornoza

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.
   

Readings & events
(in reverse chronological order)

November 16, 2009: NYC
Fiction Forum
with Susan Shapiro and Andrew Zornoza
6:30 p.m. @ the Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall
66 West 12th Street, Room 510
Admission: $5; free to all students and New School faculty, staff, and alumni with ID
Moderated by Luis Jaramillo, associate chair, The New School Writing Program.

July 1, 2009: Brooklyn, NY
Book Release / Party
7:30pm @ Abilene's Bar
442 Court Street

June 24, 2009: New York, NY
The Guerrilla Lit Reading Series w/ Kerry Cohen, Rachel Sontag, and Andrew Zornoza
7:30 PM @ BAR on A
170 Avenue A @ 11th Street

May 30, 2009: New York, NY
The Enclave XXII: The Festival of Cracked Codes (an afternoon of Punk Literature)
Featuring Michael Muhammad Knight, Cristy C. Road, and Andrew Zornoza
3 PM at the Cake Shop
152 Ludlow Street
New York City

May 24, 2009: Brooklyn, NY
Elizabeth Isadora Gold, Cate Peebles, and Andrew Zornoza
4:40 to 6 pm at the 440 Gallery
440 6th Ave. at 9th St
Park Slope, Brooklyn
(F to 7th Ave)