Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere Reviews

• 
  Nancy

  Posted at
  Shelf Inflicted
  
  

  “We had all been taught that adulthood was full of sorrow and pain, taxes and bills, dreaded work and dealings with whites, sickness and death.”

  
  
  This collection of stories is brimming with energy, hardship, sadness, humor, and compassion. The characters’ voices and life experiences are so authentic that I was able to forget about my own life and problems for a few days. I loved how these stories explored race and class in a provocative way and through an African-American lens. Z.Z. Packer captures that feeling of being an outsider so perfectly, that I couldn’t help thinking about my friend, Karen.
  
  Karen moved from Alabama to Boston in the 80’s. Tired of the increase in crime and rising rents, she and her family eventually settled in a small New Hampshire town. As much as she loved the clean air and open spaces, and despite the kindness of friends and neighbors, being one of a few African-American families in town always made them feel like outsiders.
  
  Karen and I worked at the same company and knew each other for four years. We used to have lunch together and go out for drinks after work. She wanted to attend the company Christmas party, but did not want to bring her husband, who succumbed to alcoholism after a long period of unemployment. So I offered to go with her. In my experience, company parties are stiff and boring, but it ended up being an OK time even though I would have much rather been at a dance club. After a couple of drinks, I noticed Karen seemed withdrawn. When I asked her what was wrong, she just shrugged her shoulders. A few more questions later, I learned she felt uncomfortable at the party and wanted to leave. Learning the reason for her discomfort took a lot more effort and left us both feeling frustrated. Karen admitted she was uncomfortable being the only black person at the party. People were warm and sociable and I didn’t feel she was being mistreated at all, so I couldn’t understand why she felt the way she did. Rather than explain it further, Karen asked me to attend the Black Social, a company-sponsored event for black professionals, with her the following evening. Just like the Christmas party, people were friendly, shook hands, asked about my job, and made me feel welcome. There was no reason for me to be uncomfortable, and I wasn’t. I just had this little nagging sensation of not belonging, of being different, of standing out in a crowd. Being in Karen’s shoes for one night taught me a valuable lesson.
  
  Karen died of liver cancer in 1992, but I always think of her when I’m the only white person having breakfast at Subway.
  
• 
  Shannon

  Its a problem when you start to become more excited about picking your next read than you are about finishing your current one. Or when you think you’re almost done and your reaction is - Oh. One more story - instead of - Oh! One more story! As much as I wanted to love this book - I didn't. There were three stories that I was eager to see what would happen, but the others I found myself flipping to see how many pages they had left. I’m not sure what the problem was because the use of sarcasm made me laugh throughout. Although, now that I think about it, the girls in each story seemed to have the same personality. I think I'd much rather read a novel from this author because I like the girls that appear in this book, but I think they're one character. If whatever the author writes next has a young black female protagonist, sign me up!
• 
  Brian

  This is a perfect example of reading the right book at the wrong time.
  
  A decade ago I read this collection of stories amidst about dozen other collections - I can see now that the ragged beauty and relentless, gritty storytelling was lost in the sea of other (lesser) works. But this time around I read the right book at the right time; Packer's live-wire sentences and perfectly constructed characters in a wide range of settings are about as close to perfection you can get in the writing of short fiction. I am so very happy I returned to this collection a second time.
  
  Highly recommended.
• 
  Nathan

  After finishing up a string of dark and heady reads, I picked this up for some light summer reading, on my wife's recommendation. We had originally picked it to read together before bed. The conversation as best I remember went something like:
  
  Me: Oh man, that Gary Soto book of short stories for children was really funny. that's perfect reading for right before bed.
  Wife: (Already scanning the bookshelves in our bedroom) Oh yeah, we should pick out something else like that. Is this David Sedaris book any good?
  Me: It's okay I guess. There are some funny moments.
  Wife: Oh My God! ZZ Packer! This book is perfect!
  
  We never got around to reading it together, but I picked it up last week on my own, and let me just say my wife's gift for non sequitur is unparalleled. While there are splashes of humor to be found in a few of these stories none of them at their core are funny, or light, or breezy. They don't give you any warm fuzzy feelings. They, in fact, pack quite a punch.
  
  Despite being a bit thrown, I really enjoyed the first couple of stories. Packer, as probably everyone in America but me was already aware, is writing about growing up as an African American woman dealing with protestant roots and coming to terms with various dark aspects of humanity. I especially related to the stories that recounted her characters' struggles with their religious culture. Some of the stories Like "Brownies" and "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" are so unassuming and naturally recounted that they feel like a friend talking about small but poignant moments from her true past. Others, such as "Speaking in Tongues" and "Geese" are so gut-wrenchingly brutal, you want to believe there is no way anything like this could possibly be true, although such belief would be naive.
  
  When Packer is on, her writing is nearly flawless in terms of her tone and how she weaves her stories. It is rare to find a writer who writes with so little pretension, so little effort. The opening story "Brownies" is perfect. Packer can't sustain this kind of tight, streamlined storytelling through all eight stories. I thought "the Ant of Self" and "Geese" where particularly problematic. But there are several gems here.
  
  My big issue with the book is that her source material for each story seems wholly breathed from one idea. That isn't to say I don't appreciate the idea of a cohesive collection of stories, but these stories, when read in succession, start to feel like different illustrations all taken from the same sermon. It almost feels like she set out to write a novel, but wasn't sure which angle to write from, so instead she settled on telling short versions of every idea she sketched. By the eighth story, It feels a little bit self-indulgent and preachy. This is too bad, because the really beautiful stories here, "Brownies, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Our Lady of Peace, and Speaking in Tongues" speak for themselves. I think if Packer covered a bit more ground, the collection would be better balanced.
  
  The overall lack of 3-dimensional supporting characters adds to this feeling of unbalance. In each story the main character seems to be completely surrounded by either sleazy, heartless, or well-meaning but grossly ignorant mentor figures. With the exception of the protagonist in "the Ant of Self," which I found to be probably the weakest story in the collection, there isn't a single positive male character to be found.
  
  Still, the collection is full of humanity, honesty, and heart, and the stories are poetically told. I'm glad my wife bait-and-switched me into picking this up.
  
  Now, where is that light summer pulp?
  
  
• 
  Dagio_maya

  ”Affrettò il passo, senza sapere il perché, finché non capì. Il five-and-dime da Clovee’s. Non appena lo vide, si rese conto di cosa stava facendo.
  Dentro faceva caldo, e Doris si avvicinò alla spina per le bibite, dove faceva ancora più caldo per via della griglia. Davanti alla macchinetta per il gelato c’era un bianco che si preparava il milkshake. Altri due bianchi stavano seduti al bancone, e parlottavano a bassa voce, seriosi, tirando su ogni tanto il loro milkshake con la cannuccia.
  C’era anche una cameriera, appoggiata su un fianco, a strofinare il bancone con un cencio che aveva visto giorni più puliti. Senza alzare lo sguardo disse: «Mi dispiace, non serviamo persone di colore».
  «Bene» disse Doris, «perché non ne mangio.»
  STA ARRIVANDO DORIS –
  
  
  Il mio grande e profondo coinvolgimento con la scrittura afroamericana è nato dopo la lettura di romanzi e saggi di Toni Morrison e prima ancora dalle riflessioni di bell hooks.
  In particolare, sono interessata alla scrittura femminile afroamericana perché se in generale si tratta di una narrativa che congiunge il passato (e dunque tutto ciò che ruota attorno alla situazione schiavista) ed il presente (che continua in tutti gli Stati Uniti, anche poco velatamente, ad evidenziare l’irrisolto conflitto razziale) le donne hanno il valore aggiunto di mettere sul piatto anche la questione del genere.
  
  Non essendoci una grande richiesta di mercato (mi fa male scriverlo ma è così), in Italia le traduzioni di questo genere di opere scarseggiano.
  Così quando mi è capitato tra le mani un libro di Zuwena Packer, per gli amici ZZ, non mi sono lasciato sfuggire l’occasione (
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZZ_Packer).
  
  La raccolta comprende otto racconti che mi hanno sorpreso per la densità di azione e dei dialoghi serrati.
  E’ una lettura che mi ha teletrasportato in diversi ambienti e situazioni.
  
  Ci sono molti racconti che rappresentano –anche in modo sarcastico- l’ambiente ecclesiastico: metodista, battista episcopale, o altro: tutti con il comune denominatore di soffocare la personalità individuale e diffondere un pensiero arcaico rispetto alla società in cui vivono.
  
  Poi c’è quel filo bicromatico che impacchetta tutti e gli otto racconti: il bianco e nero che, nonostante lo si voglia sfumare e fondere, continua ad essere una costante della società a stelle e strisce.
  Il nero è ancora un colore che infastidisce, risalta ma, curiosamente, è anche invisibile:
  
  «Non se ne accorgerà» disse Marcelle, abbracciandola. «Per loro siamo tutti uguali.» (GLOSSOLALIA)
  
  Così si sente dire l’adolescente Tia che, scappando di casa, non vuole essere notata alla stazione degli autobus.
  Può tranquillamente confondersi nella folla:
  un punto nero visibile ma senza connotati propri perché l’occhio bianco guarda senza distinguere l’individualità.
  
  E quando si nega un colore (chiudendo gli occhi, uniformando…) non si sta, forse, negando l’esistenza umana stessa?
  
  
  «Mi sono comprata questo vestito per il ballo» disse, rivolta a Livia. «È un vestito lungo con delle rose su ogni lato delle spalline. Le spalline sono di quel verde menta che va di moda adesso, ma il resto è tutto un lungo abito color pelle. Mamma morirebbe se lo vedesse, ma quel che è fatto è fatto.»
  «Color pelle?» disse Doris.
  «Lo so! Troppo osé!»
  «Il colore della tua pelle, vorrai dire.»
  «E di chi altri sennò?» Alice si girò verso Livia in cerca di un po’ di buonsenso.
  «Il tuo colore, intendi. E quello di Livia e Mr Fott. Non il mio.»
  Alice spalancò gli occhi verso Doris. «Oh santo cielo, è solo una parola.»
  Livia intervenne: «Ma perché usare una parola se non è appropriata? Di certo non è il colore della pelle che hanno tutti».
  «Ah sì, e come dovrei dire? Come lo dovrei chiamare? Che dico: “Oh, ho comprato un vestito del colore della pelle di tutti quanti tranne Doris”?»
  «Non sono l’unica.»
  «Quando dico che è color pelle lo capiscono tutti di che sto parlando. Lo capiscono esattamente, di che sto parlando.»
  «Come no, Alice» disse Livia. Poi fece una risata, alta e liberatoria. «Come no, tutti quanti.»
  Alice avvicinò il pollice all’indice, come per tenere un granello di sale fra le dita. «Sono queste minuzie, Doris. Perché la tua gente si fissa sempre su queste cosette inutili, da nulla?»
  STA ARRIVANDO DORIS –
• 
  Read By RodKelly

  A pretty much perfect collection of stories! I couldn't put this one down!
• 
  Holly

  Short stories get a bad rap. You can't scroll through a GR review page without coming across mounds of complaints about how the reviewer "just isn't a short story person" or "can't connect with short stories" or "felt nothing about the stories." Great! But a short story isn't supposed to be a novel. A good short story collection is meant to be savored and contemplated story by story, not plowed through in hopes of extracting a single tear. Anyways, I've made a commitment to conquer some of the collections lingering in my TBR pile, too often left to the dust in favor of the glorious novel.
  
  ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a beautiful book and, stunning stories aside, I loved holding it in my hands. Packer's stories navigate the pathways between the conservative, religious home, blackness in the world, and the tension between the two in white-dominated academia. It didn't really matter that so many of these situations seemed improbable: driving an alcoholic father six hundred miles to D.C. because he wants to sell birds, a virgin running away to Atlanta to meet up with a predatory drug-dealer, a teacher traveling to Japan without a plan and meeting up with a ragtag (if an attempted murderer is merely "ragtag") band of ex-pats. The important part of the stories weren't the actions, but the reactions; how education, race, and religion inform these characters' decisions, morality, and both conscious and subconscious struggles.
  
  Most of the stories are five-star stories, a few four-stars, nothing less. "Doris Is Coming," the final story in the collection, was my favorite. Packer's stories are sneaky complicated, always coming off like a plot-driven narrative on the surface—enough to keep those short stories h8rs under control—but there's really a gorgeously complex series of streams and tributaries bubbling underneath them. And the threads are always a part of the same sweater. Packer doesn't fall victim to Doing Too Much, trying to make too many points in a limited space. This is a wonderful piece of work, and all the rather nauseating praise bookending the collection is well-deserved.
• 
  C.M. Arnold

  This is the type of book that inspires you to improve upon your own writing. It's not often that I get a "Woah, her/his writing puts a battery in my back to level up with my writing" feeling from newer books. I'm not saying that I think I write better than every writer that has emerged in the 2010's, not at all, but they rarely give me the same writing inspiration that 90's books do. It is also rare for me to feel that I'm getting fully-formed characters and a full-bodied reading experience from short story collections. Not the case here. I felt all throughout this book. Every story had a purpose. Every story had either a moral or morality being questioned. Every character felt fully realized with faceted personalities. This was a totally immersive reading experience. When I came out of one story feeling complete, as if the book could end there and I'd consider it a victory, I'd roll right into another story and experience that was just as well told. This collection embodies everything I respect in a writer: The ability to tell a story (not just beautiful gibberish one has to tax the mind to decipher, if there is a meaning to be extracted at all), the inventiveness to make said story interesting, real sounding dialogue, a strong writing voice, build up, a little bait and switch, and endings that leave you wondering but not wanting.
  
  This book had the added charm that a few of the stories take place in my little corner of the world. I was taken by surprise when Louisville streets, neighborhoods, interstates, bridges...and then even podunk places in Southern Indiana....started getting name-dropped in a way that only a person who's lived here could do. If you do a quick look up of ZZ Packer, it says she's from Chicago. Dig a little deeper and you will find out that while she was BORN in Chicago, she was RAISED in Louisville. I had no idea when I started this book. She went to the same high school as my best friend.
  
  I published a short story collection, i see you, about a month before I started on Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. With my book I wanted to attempt to be more sparse with my fiction. After writing a whole series to get one concept realized (probably 2000 pages over the course of 4 books) & another 400+ page novel that I ended up shelving...I wanted to write a book with a thinner fucking spine. And in some ways I backed off where I didn't necessarily have to. I love writing dialogue. Dialogue comes very easy for me. But deciding what to put after the quotes can be tricky. How is something said? Can you convey well enough in the words you put between the quotes to not need words after the quotes? I approach dialogue almost from a script writing perspective. I can perfectly visualize in my mind the facial expressions and tonal inflections of my characters. However, without an actor, how do you make sure your reader sees/hears exactly what you do? In trying to not over explain...facial expressions I could sum up in a couple words became a crux (smirks, half smiles, side glances, etc). ZZ Packer showed me that it's okay to fully showcase how something is being said. Or rather, if you're going to tell an audience how something was said instead of letting them confer for themselves, you might as well paint the full picture. Examples:
  
  Arnetta enunciated her words in a way that defined contradiction. "We just had it."
  
  They'd look at each other with the silence of passengers who'd narrowly escaped an accident, then nod their heads, whispering with solem horror, "Caucasian."
  
  (These passages were taken from the first story, "Brownies," which was perhaps my favorite. Well...one of my favorites.)
  
  Oddly enough, I started delving into short story collections more after I wrote one. Right before Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, I'd read some Flannery O' Connor. Oddly enough...in my collection and both the aforementioned collections...religion is a major theme. I was surprised to find how similar O' Connor's and Packer's outlook on the subject were to my own. The religious thread in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is not the religious thread that is in "Christian" books, to be sure. It is the religious thread that is critical or Christendom, conscientious of Christ, and cognizant of the slanted shallowness that is the American evangelical/Baptist/Catholic experience. It is a religious thread rooted in blunt reality and suspicion of pomp and stance. Religion, for so many people, is about going through the motions. Saying the things, doing the things, aligning oneself with the things...and the things are usually mortal man mandated. 
  
  ZZ Packer also has a supreme knack for imagery. In today's literary novels imagery has taken on lyrical, at times inconsequential, traits. This imagery is more symmetry than poetry.
  
  Dezi kissed her cheek, and threw away the cotton ball as though the two actions held the same value. Though it was the first time any male had kissed her, she didn't feel the import of this until after it was done. She had always imagined when someone kissed her, her eyes would be closed in anticipation, she would be waiting to receive the kiss, and her beloved would be waiting to give it---waiting, of course, for the proper moment. Dezi had taken something away from her when he kissed her, but she could not name it.
  
  Though the character is too young and naive to put her finger on it, the realistic reader surely can infer what's not said: He removed the fantasy. The facade. The fairy-tale princessness-esque perfection of it all.
  
  Lastly, I'll leave this review with some of the dark beauty of the final paragraph of the final story.
  
  The world was cold around her, moving toward dark, but not dark yet, as if the darkness were being adjusted with a volume dial. Whoever was adjusting the dial was doing it slowly, consistently, with infinite patience.
• 
  Ify

  3.5 stars
  
  The thoughts I shared while reading this collection of stories remain true: Packer crafts sentences and metaphors like she invented writing. I was simply astounded by the originality of her writing style. There were so many instances when I wanted to memorize a sentence or two because of how masterfully it was written. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a collection of short stories, brimming with talent, and featuring black protagonists, living in the U.S. or abroad, who are tinged with sadness. While I found the stories striking and unusual, I also thought that the development and conclusion of some of the stories were somewhat lacking, either losing steam as the story progressed or ending too abruptly for my taste.
  
  Regardless, I would still recommend this read.
• 
  Paris (parisperusing)

  Can't believe I waited this long to read these stories—and my gosh are they a breath of fresh air. Z.Z. Packer is of a rank that is completely her own, but I could easily sense her work resonating with the new guard of today's contemporaries—the brilliance of Raven Leilani, Dantiel W. Moniz, and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson instantly come to mind.
  
  “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” is a timeless masterclass in style, tension, and craft that artistically conveys the aches of Black womanhood, freedom, religion, interracial curiosities, and sexuality—all very urgent themes scuffling for visibility. Z.Z. Packer is truly one of a kind, the Chosen One.
• 
  Kirk

  It's almost a chore to get past the praise excerpted in the first few pages of this debut story collection from 2003. Much better to simply turn to the stories themselves and make your own judgments. These are certainly accomplished short fictions, literary in the sense that their plots are asymmetical in interesting ways, many ending with codas that introduce ambiguity instead of wrapping up the drama. The subject is the African-American experience, of course, of all varieties: children, teenagers, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, churchgoers, past and present. One of the intriguing themes is the black awareness of how racism damps down empathetic impulses; in "Brownies," for example, a troop of Af-Am girls make fun of mildly retarded "Caucasions" after hearing the latter utter the N word. In the title story, a self-destructive Yale student shuts herself off from a potential ally/friend with whom she has something in common (the death of a mother), leading to a devastating moment of indifference that ruins their connection. My one criticism is that there are maybe 1-2 too many coming of age stories---I found myself more interested in "Every Tongue Shall Confess" and even the Japan-set "Geese" than the New Yorker published "The Ant of the Self," which strikes me as a fairly conventional "our parents are doomed to fail us" story if not for its Million Man March backdrop. And "Speaking in Tongues" demonstrates the dangers of loose plotting: a long picaresque about a 14-year-old searching for her mother among the shadier streets of Atlanta goes nowhere fast. That said, the prose is immaculate. It will be interesting to see what Packer does in her long-awaited novel The Thousands, out next year.
• 
  Elise

  Ugh. I spent the entire last part of this book debating in my head whether I was going to be generous and give it three stars, or be honest and stick it with two. I chose honesty.
  
  This collection is not without its strengths: some careful writing, some witty characters. I downright enjoyed the one about the lesbians at college.
  
  But I can't handle all the stupid main characters! Call me an idealist, but I can't imagine that even a sheltered Pentacostal Georgia girl would run off to Atlanta and, within the span of forty-eight hours, shack up with a drug dealer/wannabe pimp without thinking maybe something was amiss. And what about the kid who hates hates hates his drunken father, bails him out of jail because he has to, and then proceeds to drive his drunken father hundreds of miles because he asked to be driven there just for a lark? Ugh. Don't even get me started on the stupidity of the characters in the story in Japan, gross and ridiculous.
  
  The protagonists started to all feel like the Kentucky Christian girl who was too smart for her crappy Kentucky life, and they all kept thinking completely incongruous ideas. Don't think I'll be rereading.
• 
  Liz Yon)

  I read this book of stories in one day, it is so engaging. Each story is a perfect jewel, prised from the glittering mayhem of life, held up to the light of unsentimental regard, each facet clearly shown. The characters are absolutely true to life, their situations real and immediate in a way that makes me feel that Packer lived these things and these people - if not personally, then through people she knows well. Dialogue flows believably into the reader's "ear", turns of phrase are peppery and clever with not a cliche in sight, and no matter what terrible bit of the human condition the characters undergo, there is always a wry humor lurking and begging a laugh (a life philosophy my great-granny taught me; if you don't laugh at it you'll cry, and laughing is better for the soul). There's a hard edge under softness and a soft caress beneath the hard shell of these characters. They are sometimes angry, sometimes self-righteous, sometimes defiant, and always fascinating. Packer drives right into her stories from the first sentence and speaks to us in a straight-forward manner, no fancy acrobatics of language, and yet never loses the clean, poetic rhythm that draws one onward. The stories go down smooth and easy, and I read each to the end before I knew I'd been caught. A must-read for any aspiring writer of short stories.
• 
  Nea

  Z.Z. Packer has been around for over a decade, but I'd never even heard of her until recently. Thank Heaven for Goodreads! Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is her debut collection of short stories; and I give it two big thumbs up. It isn't some perfect masterpiece and (of course) some stories grabbed me more than others, but it's good. Very good. I love the wide array of African American characters she brought to life- different ages, sexes, and lifestyles. From church ladies to queer lovers to runaway teenagers. I found these characters highly relatable, and their situations intriguing.
  
  My only complaint is that the narrative voice didn't always seem to fit. At times it was a little too...uhm...perfect for the storyline; and it didn't change much from one story to the next. When I see this in books it makes me feel like I'm reading something written by a journalist or academic paper writer. That may seem like a ridiculous complaint, but it's a pet peeve of mine.
  
  I like authors who play with words and display a lofty vocabulary; but I love authors who know WHEN this is appropriate(and when it is not). The issue of voice was only a problem with two (I think?) of the stories in this book, so overall I truly enjoyed reading it.
  
  I can't wait to read more from this author. This debut is a definite display of great literary potential.
• 
  Jen Knox

  I've heard a lot of criticism about this book, so I put off reading it. This just goes to show I rarely agree with my friends when it comes to literature ... I loved it. "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" was my favorite story in the collection, but I felt attached to all of them. Each one! I never say that about a collection.
• 
  Emily

  There are two things that I hate about my writing: the fact that it’s predictable and the fact that nothing happens.
  
  On the other hand, what makes ZZ Packer such a spectacular writer is that her stories do the exact opposite of what mine do: they create original situations and characters that could only exist in her stories, and they move. The action moves, yes, but more importantly it moves you.
  
  So many of the stories in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere feel familiar at first. They contain people and worlds we may know or have already read, but, within a few paragraphs, there is some beautiful detail, some fantastic show of character that makes you think, a.) Thank God she isn’t turning this story about an inner city teacher into an already-done version of Dangerous Minds, and b.) I can’t imagine anyone doing or saying that except for this character.
  
  That, to me, is fantastic storytelling. That, to me, is outstanding character development.
  
  My fiction professor this summer interrupted a workshop by holding up his hand and shaking his head in disagreement. Someone had been saying something about a character not being believable, how no one she knew would ever do that. It was one of the hottest days of the summer, and the wood-walled classroom smelled like a sauna. One drop of sweat fell from behind my professor’s ear down into the U of his clavicle and stayed there.
  
  “There is no such thing as a character being believable. Characters do not serve as some version of a person you’ve met or known before. Characters have to be true to themselves. They’re individuals, they are unique, and if they’re good characters, they are not someone you know or have ever known. What is important is to achieve an understanding of a character so that their actions are actions only they would take, and their words are words that only they would say.”
  
  I think I fell in love with him in that moment. Or maybe it was the moment he held class outside, sitting Zen-like on the hard ground, not moving a muscle while we all fidgeted and complained about the sun and the ants and the birds shitting on us. “I’m sixty years old,” he said. “If I can take it, your young bodies can, too.” When we stood up at the end of the three-hour class, he wiped the dirt from his bare calves and seemed unfazed.
  
  Had ZZ Packer been in our class the day that he explained that characters were not representations of people, but real people themselves, our professor would have pulled her nine-pager from that week’s pile and read it aloud to us in his steady voice. “This!” he would have said when he was done, “This is exactly what I mean.”
  
  Maybe what is so remarkable is that Packer doesn’t even need an entire novel to realize her characters. Franzen wasted 500+ pages on characters that felt one-dimensional, hysterical, and undeveloped. Packer knocks them out in 30-40 page stories that effervesce with people, life, and language.
  
  And, oh, her language! The margins of my books are pockmarked with stars and exclamation points next passages that move me or stick out as remarkably well written, and there is no shortage of pen marks in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. The difference, however, is that Packer has the distinct ability to create analogies and descriptive moments that serve double duty. They are original and remarkable, yes, but they serve a purpose, whether it being by comparing the young white girls’ complexions to ice cream flavors, or the salesman standing alone among his electronics to a man standing in a graveyard, or describing a middle eastern man’s face looking “as dim as a brown fist,” or how one character stuffed certain foods into her mouth “like a pacifier,” or (the most heartbreaking moment) how the abandoned daughter in search of her mother sees “a squirrel on the sidewalk, dead, clutching the branch that had failed it.” Packer doesn’t just throw out analogies because of a similarity in appearance, sound, or sensation. She uses each description to underscore the issues and themes that run through and support her stories like a circulatory system: race, violence, sexuality, progress, religion, poverty, abandonment, and loss.
  
  What writers do that anymore? No writers that’s who. Writers concoct analogies that work like mine just did above, comparing the themes of a book to a vascular system to show how supportive they are to the story, not to spotlight the actual themes themselves. As Zadie Smith says in her praise of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, ZZ Packer has “the kind of brilliance for narrative that should make her peers envious and her readers very, very grateful.” Am I envious? You bet. Am I grateful? Undoubtedly, and I will continue to be grateful as a reader, a writer, and a citizen of the world that Packer has split open and shown to anyone lucky enough to read her work.
• 
  Oriana

  Ooh boy I am terribly behind on writing reviews. Um, what did I think of this? Well, it's a great example of why I hate short stories – when they're bad I wonder why I bothered, and when they're good I can't understand why the author only gave me such a tiny tease. The title story is the best, and "Our Lady of Peace" is great too... so why, ZZ, why? Either of those could have been novels, I'd have kept reading for lots more pages!
  
  A couple of other thoughts:
  1. By chance I got an Australian edition of this book, so I kept subconsciously trying to make these like "old, racist South" stories take place in Australia, or figure out why an Australian person would have written about them. That confused the shit out of me until I took my head out of my ass.
  2. I hate reading about Jesus, which I know is closed-minded and I'm sorry, but even when it is obviously central to the characters or amidst an otherwise compelling story, I glaze over once we get into church or anyone starts to pray explicitly.
  3. I remember I had what was surely a brilliant thought about how the language here is so spare and economical as to almost disappear, by which I mean the stories, at their best, almost made me forget I was reading at all; they just unspooled fully formed in my head, with no distracting metaphors or symbolism or anything.
  
  Sorry, I'm sure I had other things to say but I forgot them. Did ZZ write a novel yet? I'd read that, but no more effing short stories.
• 
  Aubrey

  Once upon a time, this was a hyped up work indeed. Combine that with being assigned one or two of the short stories in one of my classes during my last and most beloved year of undergrad, add in my own "diversity" sensitivities, and you have a recipe for my choosing to read this. After having done so, the usual spiel of my not being a short story person, plus apologies for reading a Woolf collection practically just before this, plus some other disinclinations on my part, and you have my unfortunately frequent reaction to contemporary works that are praised to the heavens. Now, 16-17 years ago may not qualify as contemporary anymore, but this collection still has, for the most part,that vague, unwilling to commit to any time period in particular, before the smartphone and after the political movements. Throw in some very tropeish handlings of disability, sex work, and queerness, and you have something that thinks it is doing something new without doing very much at all. Now, I did like "Every Tongue Shall Confess" and "Doris is Coming" for their being able to probe an indefinable something of the human psyche without resorting to sensationalisms, but after having gone through this self-consciously "apolitical" text, I feel the author knew that white people would like that second, final-in-the-collection one. All in all, these left me with the glazed over feeling of watching one too many chaotic action scenes in a movie that I later discovered to have cut out in pre-production a scene implying queer romance. Whatever 'command of language' and 'impressive range' that exist here were not the sort to pique my fancy, and I'd like to think that I've read and liked enough short story collections by black people that I'm not simply chasing after an errantly constructed 'type.'
  
  I may or may not have read the first story, "Brownies," for that previously mentioned class. While it did seem familiar, in hindsight, the subject material involving race clashing with (white) mental disability didn't seem like it would fit with said class' concerns with postcolonialism and/or settler states. Squ*w, r*tard, the very picture postcard stereotypes of gays and dykes: honestly, it doesn't surprise me Updike liked this so much, so concerned with its own reality and so blithe about the the mass media construction of others. Had less of the stories not followed a quickly repetitive pattern of sensational build up and nearly complete lack of resolution, I might have been more distracted by the fleshed out narrative and solid concerns and forgiven the odd slur or four as quick and easy image propagators. As it stands, I barely even remember the one bearing the title involving an ant, and if that's not a warning sign, nothing is. I just wish that this cycle didn't repeat itself with so many 21st century literary offerings, as it becomes harder and harder to drag myself back from a hundred, two hundred, near a millennia ago where time has done a lot more testing, if also often a lot more distorting. If this collection gets more people reading relevant material during this Black History Month, all well and good. Otherwise, it almost seemed this work was going against the grain in terms of politic and narrative structure without having a solid backbone to prop it all up. Conscientiously glib, then, in everything outside of the realm of blackness. Not very appealing in my mind. That, or I just don't like stories about people getting into prestigious colleges and then wasting the opportunity. A personal quibble on my part, then.
  
  So, not the best way to start off Black History Month , but I have a couple other (older) works lined up, so I'll at least gain a broader spread of decades by the end of this leap year month. Despite my near endless ramblings on, I really don't know why this work left me cold. I admit to not being objective about it, but I was also a lot more impressed by the titular story during that long ago class, but perhaps that was because I was also in the middle of my own incipient queer realizings (initialized by my observing similarities between my class' professor and a former roommate: a "type," if you will). In that scenario, I was much more sympathetic to refusals to seeing oneself outside of the cis straight and narrow than I am now. In terms of the rest of the stories, they didn't have what I liked in the aforementioned "Every Tongue Shall Confess": reconciliation without an attempt at a crafting the sort of devastating blow that only O'Connor, and perhaps a few others I have not yet read, seems capable of in short story form; thus a more effective delivery, if only through lowering the risk. Packer supposedly has a novel coming up, so if it appeals to those who weren't wowed by this collection, it may have a chance with me.
• 
  Adira

  A lot of these stories just petered off and seem to either over shoot the medium the author used or are just underwhelming over all. Out of the collection of stories, I only really enjoyed “Brownies,” “Our Lady of Peace,” and “The Ant of the Self.”
  
  “Brownies” tells the story of an elementary aged group of Black girls who are on their annual Brownie Scouts retreat and have a run in with an all-white Brownie Scout group. The story worked due to Z. Z. Packer’s skilled use of slowly etching out characters and revealing just enough to the readers as needed until the “big reveal.” This allows Packer’s simple story about peer pressure to turn into a grander story that’s multifacted and tackles a myriad of topics that include racism, losing your parents as “heroes,” and even on to the traditional message of trusting your own voice in a crowd. While simple, this story felt like a good opener to the collection. Sadly, Packer doesn’t deliver on the promise this story offers throughout the collection.
  
  “Our Lady of Peace” was a somber, but laughable tale of a woman who leaves her small town to go to Baltimore and teach inner city kids on a whim. Simple clean cut story, but the way Packer handles the tale felt almost like a detailed character story in less than ten pages. Unlike the other eight stories, this story felt like it had a clear beginning, middle, and an end along with an actual purpose to being told by the author. This was a standout story for this reason because a lot of the stories in the collection felt like a waste because they lacked a clear intent for me as a reason. Packer managed to make me care about this character in the short story in a small amount of time I knew the woman and I was legit mad she chose to give another character a follow up story opposed to the main character in this story since her story was so compelling.
  
  Lastly, “The Ant of the Self” did a good job catching emotions similar to the way the “Our Lady of Peace” story did. Yet, unlike the aforementioned story, the ending wasn’t as tidy, but it was understandable in this case since the chaos of the ending adds to the tumultuous narrative of an estranged father and son who find themselves selling birds at the Million Man March to make some quick cash. This story displays the rage that a child could possibly feel at being left behind by their parent who flits in and out their lives and only brings chaos when they reappear. I enjoyed the way Packer uses this story to provide commentary about the Black man and his role in the community and the Black family and the irony she lends to this topic through her characters.
  
  If you want to read a better and more cohesive collection of short stories by an African-American auhor, is suggest J. California Cooper’s
  Homemade Love, which is a collection of stories that does character study extremely well and balance morality, pop culture topics, and humor evenly.
• 
  SheriC

  I was enchanted with this book of short stories at first, but gradually lost enthusiasm as I progressed through the short stories. I love the author’s ability to draw characters through their actions and interactions with each other and their environment. I love her ability to create a sense of place and how her characters fit in that setting. I love the little thought-provoking moments in each story. But there was an unrelenting sameness to the stories. She likes Shirley Jackson-ish main characters: young people who live too much in their own heads, socially-awkward, alternating between remaining passively and resentfully where they are and impulsively jumping into situations that they then don’t know how to extricate themselves from. She also doesn’t seem to know how to wrap a story up. Most of them just end abruptly, like the author just ran out of things to say. Of the eight short stories, the best were “Brownies” and “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”
  
  Paperback copy, which I will donate to the library as I don’t keep paperbacks that I rated fewer than 4 stars. Although this book has been on my physical TBR for two years, I don’t remember what prompted me to buy it. It was probably something I read when I was looking for TBR recs when I started the Book Riot challenge for
  We Need Diverse Books.
  
  I read it for The 16 Tasks of the Festive Season: Square 16 December 26th-31st: Book themes for Kwanzaa: Read a book written by an author of African descent or a book set in Africa, or whose cover is primarily red, green or black. The author, ZZ Packer, is African-American.
  
  Previous Updates:
  11/9/17 82/265pg
  Although the stories themselves are of varying quality so far, the writing is wonderfully evocative. This author can do more in less than 2 dozen pages to create a world, people it with real characters, and provoke my emotions than many authors can accomplish in a novel-length story.
  
  11/10/17 210/265pg
  This author apparently has no use for happy endings to her stories. They're not unrelentingly grim, but it's close.
  
• 
  Alexa

  This was such a wonderful surprise for me, never having heard of her before. Eight stories, none the least bit predictable, although with each one she was able to tease me a bit, get me thinking that I knew where it was going, but it never was! Real, charming people in pain and trouble dealing with life’s blows – good, good, good stuff!
• 
  Hannah

  One of the best books I've read in a while. Read it for tfa book club (aka three tfa friends drink a beer together monthly to talk about great literature by women of color). Unsettling and provoking and pretty sure one of the stories is about a tfa teacher.
• 
  Never Without a Book

  Humor, compassion and unforgettable characters, these stories beg to be read. I highly recommend it.
• 
  Nicholas Armstrong

  I'm not sure where to start with this, as I'm not sure which bothered me more or what takes precedent with a short story. Is the telling of the story more important than the voice? Is there something more important than both? What if both aren't quite up-to-snuff? That is kind of the case here and I'm a little put-off by it.
  
  I'll start with the voice, because it was the first thing that bothered me and it consistently bothered me. Don't get me wrong, there are good stories within, or, at least decent stories within, but Packer's voice is so strong in all of them that it ruins whatever she may have been aiming for. It isn't like reading Vonnegut and saying, oh, this is Vonnegut, I can tell by the prose. It is more like, oh, this is Packer, I can tell by the opinions. I'm not saying that authors shouldn't have opinions or that they should not be incorporated into stories, but if done poorly we end up sermonizing. The last thing anyone wants to read is a sermon on how to live, what is naughty and what is right, and that sort. These stories were so concerned with race that I couldn't help wondering why. Let it be known, I am white, I also live in California, maybe it is different here, but black people and white people are pretty similar. The mentalities in some of Packer's stories (and this was published in 2003) are so racist I thought each one took place in 1961. I know racism exists still and I know there are parts of America that are far more prone to it, but when nearly every story is hung up on race I begin to wonder.
  
  Let's break that thought for a moment though, I think after having finished this book I need to do a little sermonizing myself. I get that there is racism still alive and well today and that there was a history of it, but goddammit stop acting like it is the only important thing. So much of what is associated with black people is about slavery that there is almost no thought put into any of the other things they've done. I mean, we wouldn't even need a black history month to teach people about it if we just incorporated the shit into history. Langston Hughes, for example, is cited as this father of agony and pain by Packer but I find it insulting that that is the only focus on him. I don't care that he was black, I care that his poems were amazing. I care that he incorporated a culture and music and a feeling in a way that so many others could not. What his poems were about were second to my awe at how they were crafted, and I think it's sad that so many people care about the what they don't really respect him for the how. This is how I view this novel. Every story seems so hung up on race that Packer didn't really have anything to say about anything else, and I think that is a little depressing.
  
  But outside of that, there is the process of storytelling. Prose and diction are one thing, but there is also simply the craft, deciding what makes the final cut and what does not, and whether or not the message is clear. So many of the stories seemed literally to ramble across time and descriptions and all it did was distract me. Perhaps Packer's intent was a 'slice of life' sort of thing, but in writing I always felt that was ridiculous. We don't write the way life is just like dialogue isn't written like real conversations -- it's boring. So what Packer has is several stories which end in places that feel almost entirely random. The characters seem to make no breakthroughs and the stories progression is not a steady incline but more a straightaway which simply says 'end road'.
  
  Then there is what we see and what we do not. I get the strong feeling all of these stories were thoughts itching at the back of Packer's mind that she didn't flesh out until she sat down. I imagine this because so many things are assumed. We are somehow supposed to know that a character's arm was scratched, despite it not being described -- and most importantly, that we as the reader were reading the scene where the character was scratched, despite there being no description of it. It honestly just seems amateurish to not fix these mistakes, there is no reason to leave out these scenes. Either mention the scratch, so when it is describe we understand, or cut it altogether, do not cut the action and leave the scene. As they say (they all do, really), Show, don't tell.
  
  Outside of these, I still have another complaint, and it is in the descriptions. Must we be beat over the head? I'm not huge on symbolism, and I often feel that simply writing an essay or treatise on a subject is more effective than masking it behind a poor story, but trying to make something symbolic and then telling your reader what it means is... insulting. Either tell me, or don't, do not show me and then explain it. It insults the reader, and it insults the point. What really irks me was that this was done so casually and with so many things that were entirely unimportant. How a sunset or a lake reflected a person or situation would first be described, i.e., the sun was setting at the end of her day, and then we would be told, much like the way her day had ended, with a beautiful but short interlude in a distant land. It's just so... awful. It's like reading a parable for adults.
  
  Keep in mind, this isn't terrible, and the writing isn't terrible, but I've read things just as good in my college English courses. It reeks of inexperience as well as opinions. The first things most people write are close to the heart, but things become muddled when this is done poorly and we get the thinly veiled stories of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Keep sentiments out of it and write stories and characters that are stand alone, that you like and don't, that could and do exist without your authorial presence.
  
  
• 
  Bonnie G.

  Abandoning this one 3 stories in with no rating. Look, Updike liked it, so who am I? I am willing to take the blame, but I am not feeling it. There are some wonderful sentences (the first sentence of the first story is incredibly good) but the tales felt attenuated and a bit cobbled together -- perhaps over-workshopped or not workshopped enough? I wanted to like this, I swear.
• 
  Zeyn Joukhadar

  This is one of the best short story collections I've ever read--incisive, moving, allowing characters to breathe on the page who often have the best of intentions but whose paths become complicated along the way by the simple fact of their having to navigate a racist, misogynistic world as Black women, and without judging their actions and reactions to their circumstances. Collections of this quality are extremely rare; ZZ Packer is an incredibly talented writer. I'll be reading and re-reading the stories in this collection for a while and looking forward to her novel in progress...!
• 
  Lesley

  Another spot-on ‘Backlisted’ recommendation, bigged up by Nikesh Shukla who I like and admire, and I wasn’t disappointed. This debut collection of eight longish short stories is loosely themed around rebellion, freedom and independence, while growing up Black and (bar one story) female within the constraints of family, church, the education system and a racist society, past and present.
  
  The stories are so dense and full of incident and detail I had to read each one twice. There are no neat endings, or indeed neat narratives: the stories veer and zig-zag so you’re never sure where they’re going, but you’re so engaged by the brilliant prose and dialogue it doesn’t matter. The ambiguous final scene in the final story, ‘Doris is coming’ sums it up - Doris, a Southern teenage girl in 1961, inspired by the civil rights protests, decides to stage a solo sit-in at her local whites-only diner. Some customers snigger, the waitress gives her a leftover milkshake when they leave, she reads for a bit, and goes home for dinner. Wait, what? Was that a triumph or a failure? Who knows; that’s where the story ends so you decide. And that’s how I like it.
  
  It’s also rare to find such depth of character in a short story but ZZP pulls it off - and she does really complex characters and situations. Although racialised dynamics are integral to all the stories, her characters are human, flawed, messy, sometimes admirable, sometimes appalling, but never mere mouthpieces. Political without polemics, and all the more powerful for that, highly recommended.
• 
  Sarah

  About 5 of the stories in here were absolutely perfect, while a few fell a bit short for me (hence the 4 stars). I greatly appreciate ZZ Packer's attention to small details in her writing--it's what brings nuance and color to the characters she's created. The dialogue in her writing is sharp and precise, never taking up more space than it needs to. I was also impressed with the diverse array of characters and settings presented in each of these stories. From Tokyo to Baltimore to a girl scout summer camp, Packer's stories explore the human condition in a bold and intriguing way, offering novel perspectives and interactions that made me flinch, wince and tear up, while also maintaining an impossible quirk and light in the darkness (which the characters in all of Packer's stories all seem to battle with).
  
  Favorites include: "Brownies," "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere," "Our Lady of Peace," "The Ant of the Self" & "Speaking in Tongues"