Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

An outstanding debut story collection, Z.Z. Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere has attracted as much book-world buzz as a triple espresso. Yet, surprisingly, there are no gimmicks in these eight stories. Their combination of tenderness, humor, and apt, unexpected detail set them apart. In the title story (published in the New Yorker's summer 2000 Debut Fiction issue), a Yale freshman is sent to a psychotherapist who tries to get her-black, bright, motherless, possibly lesbian-to stop "pretending," when she is sure that "pretending" is what got her this far. "Speaking in Tongues" describes the adventures of an Alabama church girl of 14 who takes a bus to Atlanta to try to find the mother who gave her up. Looking around the Montgomery Greyhound station, she wonders if it has changed much since the Reverend King's days. She "tried to imagine where the 'Colored' and 'Whites Only' signs would have hung, then realized she didn't have to. All five blacks waited in one area, all three wh...

Author: Packer Z. Z.
ISBN: 9781847676771
Year of publication: 2005
Genre: Modern prose
Number of pages: 224
Reading time: 3 h. 44 min.
Formats: FB2, EPUB, PDF
Language: english
Requests: read online, download without registration, e-book