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Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

ZZ Packer

Available as

Paperback

eBook

Published: 10 Feb 2005
ISBN: 9781841955568
RRP: £9.99
Extent: 256 pp
Dimensions: 129×198mm

Published: 1 Nov 2018
ISBN: 9781786896940
RRP: £7.99
Extent: 244 pp

Cover artwork for 'Drinking Coffee Elsewhere' by ZZ Packer - Paperback edition

Cover artwork for 'Drinking Coffee Elsewhere' by ZZ Packer - eBook edition

In a few words

The striking debut short story collection introducing an arresting and unforgettable new voice

In a few words

The striking debut short story collection introducing an arresting and unforgettable new voice

She writes a short story with more complexity and kindness that most people can muster in their creaking 500 page novels. It is the kind of brilliance for narrative that should make her peers envious and her readers very, very grateful

Zadie Smith

ZZ Packer tells it like it izz . . . her range is wide; her prose is vivid and often comic . . . her vision sizzles and fizzes

John Updike

She writes a short story with more complexity and kindness that most people can muster in their creaking 500 page novels. It is the kind of brilliance for narrative that should make her peers envious and her readers very, very grateful

Zadie Smith

ZZ Packer tells it like it izz . . . her range is wide; her prose is vivid and often comic . . . her vision sizzles and fizzes

John Updike

More about
the book

A black, motherless loner tries to come to terms with her radically unfamiliar surroundings as a Yale freshman; 14-year-old church girl Tia runs away to the big city; a bright young man makes a last-ditch attempt to understand his loser father on the Million Man March in Washington DC; at summer camp, an all-black Brownie troop decide to teach a troop of white Brownies a lesson for a racial insult they think they overheard.

Teeming with life, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a collection that explores what it is to be human. Never neatly resolved, these provocative and unforgettable stories resonate with honesty and wry humour and introduce us to a major new talent.

More about
the book

A black, motherless loner tries to come to terms with her radically unfamiliar surroundings as a Yale freshman; 14-year-old church girl Tia runs away to the big city; a bright young man makes a last-ditch attempt to understand his loser father on the Million Man March in Washington DC; at summer camp, an all-black Brownie troop decide to teach a troop of white Brownies a lesson for a racial insult they think they overheard.

Teeming with life, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a collection that explores what it is to be human. Never neatly resolved, these provocative and unforgettable stories resonate with honesty and wry humour and introduce us to a major new talent.

A true cause for celebration for those of us who feel that fiction exists to crack the world open again and inspire us with new love for it. Funny, fierce, verbally energetic, deeply compassionate - ZZ Packer is a wonderful new writer, who somehow manages to indict the species and forgive it all at once

George Saunders

If Toni Morrison has given black America back its history, ZZ Packer will shed light on its contemporary life. Serious and contentious, she never loses hold of the craft and delight of storytelling. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere has done its work: it has established a voice that will want to be heard again

Independent

I don't think I can remember where I last encountered a debut collection that so justified its existence, that buzzed with so much credibility and attitude . . . You finish the book with a mad sense that, in writing, anything is possible

Guardian

ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is taught in creative writing courses nationwide and with good reason. This short story collection is brimming with characters who are striving to find themselves, to understand themselves, and to survive

Colson Whitehead

A true cause for celebration for those of us who feel that fiction exists to crack the world open again and inspire us with new love for it. Funny, fierce, verbally energetic, deeply compassionate - ZZ Packer is a wonderful new writer, who somehow manages to indict the species and forgive it all at once

George Saunders

If Toni Morrison has given black America back its history, ZZ Packer will shed light on its contemporary life. Serious and contentious, she never loses hold of the craft and delight of storytelling. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere has done its work: it has established a voice that will want to be heard again

Independent

I don't think I can remember where I last encountered a debut collection that so justified its existence, that buzzed with so much credibility and attitude . . . You finish the book with a mad sense that, in writing, anything is possible

Guardian

Funny, tender, gripping, wise and the work of a writer seemingly at the top of her game, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is hopefully only the start of a marvellous writing career for ZZ Packer and a delightful reading odyssey for her readers of whom, if there is any justice, there will be many

Ranti Williams

ZZ Packer

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ZZ Packer is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and was selected for the New Yorker‘s summer fiction debut issue in 2002. She was named one of Granta‘s Best of Young American Novelists in 2007, and her collection of stories, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, was a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of a Commonwealth Club Fiction award. A graduate of Yale, she has been a Wallace Stegner-Truman Capote fellow and a Jones lecturer at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harpers, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review and Salon. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
@zzpacker

View profile

ZZ Packer

View profile

ZZ Packer is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and was selected for the New Yorker‘s summer fiction debut issue in 2002. She was named one of Granta‘s Best of Young American Novelists in 2007, and her collection of stories, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, was a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of a Commonwealth Club Fiction award. A graduate of Yale, she has been a Wallace Stegner-Truman Capote fellow and a Jones lecturer at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harpers, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review and Salon. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
@zzpacker

View profile