Zoetrope Issue 51

The ever-dependable Zoetrope rounded out 2009 with an issue designed by founding editor Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew, Jason Schwartzman. Nice timing, given he was appearing in cinemas at the time in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox. Nepotism aside, it’s not a bad effort from Schwartzman, who favours bright bands of colour, reversed negative images and moulding the text around the page. The ever-changing design of Zoetrope is definitely one of its strengths, though Schwartzman was up against it compared to the other designers last year, Guillermo del Toro, Rex Ray and Antony (from Antony and the Johnsons).

It’s a short issue too, with only four stories plus the eponymous classic reprint they always feature. This time it’s Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’, a classic of waiting. The theme is reflected in the other stories too, one of which is in fact called ‘Waiting’. Stuart Dybek’s essay on Hemingway is intermingled with an account of a love affair in a remote lakeside cottage. Jumping between a fictional and non-fictional voice is jarring at first, but Dybek has hit his straps in recent times (he has a great story about inland tidal waves in Granta’s current Chicago issue too) and he knows how to get under the reader’s skin. He undermines the narrator’s initial academic tone by isolating him emotionally by the lake, waiting for the return of a woman that he has badly misunderstood. He has done more than enough to make me seek out his novel, I Sailed with Magellan.

Zoetrope show their willingness to experiment with Austin Bunn’s ‘Griefer’, a dazzling tale set mostly in an online gaming world that is being slowly deleted. I haven’t read anything quite like it and although I was put off a bit by the jargon-heavy opening, persistence paid off. Yet again the protagonist waits, this time for the end of the world he has spent years building, despite the disastrous effects his time spent online has on his real world relationship. This could have been cheesy but Bunn handles it slickly, fleshing out the frightening themes of deception and identity in a very satisfying fashion.

The weak point in this issue is the translated story, by Ingo Schulze. Zoetrope must be heartily commended for including new translations of non-English fiction, but it doesn’t always work. Their Guillermo del Toro-designed issue last year was a dual English/Spanish one, with translations of every story that proved to be a tour-de-force. Schulze’s German dinner party conversation comes across as stunted and unexciting, particularly given the vibrant design and palpable energy on view elsewhere in the issue. I’d like to see some short story translations of risky non-English writers, like France’s Marie Darrieussecq and Michel Houellebecq (and any other writers whose name ends in ‘ecq’ for that matter).

There’s an ace in the hole here though. The issue’s opening story, ‘The Lost and Found Department of Greater Boston’ by Elizabeth McCracken is simply stunning. One of the best stories I read in 2009, right up there in the top 3. It concerns one Karen Blackbird, a forty-two year old mother who vanishes without a trace in 1982. That may sound like the beginning to a cop show or movie-of-the-week, but in McCracken’s hands it is anything but. With masterful prose she outlines the effect the disappearance has on young Asher Blackbird whilst delineating the sad life Karen lived in excruciating detail. As a portrait of a character we never meet, it’s silently heartbreaking, with Schwartzman’s design perfectly in tune with the narrative. McCracken has a few novels under her belt but really made an impact with her 2008 memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination, detailing the loss of her first baby. She has been on the Iowa Writer's Workshop faculty and is this year moving to that other amazing hotbed of fiction, the University of Texas at Austin. On this evidence I'd read her shopping lists.

Zoetrope may not be the quarterly on everyone’s lips or the one you spot on the shelves of many bookstores, but for my money it’s the most interesting one out there. As they enter their 14^th year it’s comforting and deeply gratifying to know Coppola is committed to quietly and without fuss setting the literary standard.