Disability
a novel by Cris Mazza

Probing deeply into the world of the severely disabled, often told in a broken shorthand, this short novel describes a government-run institution where patients, caregivers, and the state itself seem malformed and dysfunctional. Teri and Cleo are minimum-wage caretakers in a ward for severely disabled children. They are expected to feed, bathe, clothe, and carry out the required therapies for their patients within a system where funding is only continued if therapy produces improvement. But the state-paid therapists know their patients cannot improve. As their personal failures begin to emulate the travesties occurring in the ward, Teri and Cleo gradually succumb to the collapse of their own balancing act.

"Bold readers, brace yourselves. Cris Mazza has found the perfect subject for her high-energy prose and her pitch-black compassion: an Institution serving, and staffed by, the 'disabled.' Mazza's sexually confused caregivers and the doomed exuberant boy they love all come to frightening life. But calling this a 'slice of' life would diminish it: DISABILITY is as dense, relentless, tender, savage and strange as moment-by-moment life itself, conjured on the page whole."

Elizabeth Searle
author of A Four-sided Bed

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Many Ways to Get It,
Many Ways to Say It
a novel by Cris Mazza

In the 80’s a 20-something young woman advertises her services as a model to photographers. She discovers their weaknesses, seduces them, then extorts them by claiming to be under-age. In the 90’s a 40-something man is married to a doctor who only views him as a sexual object. He embarks on a who’s-kissing-who / who’s-saying-what-to-who misadventure that only an adolescent should have. In these two reversals of sexual harassment and gender-inferiority, Mazza explores such issues as the language of bodies, sexual desirability as an innate urge, latent adolescence, plus what the genders share … and what they can never share.

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Michael Martone
author of The Flatness and Other Landscapes

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"Her fiction...has teeth...A gifted editor of innovative fiction by women, Cris Mazza is also one of its most audacious practitioners."

Jaimy Gordon
author of Bogeywoman and 
She Drove Without Stopping

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"Provocative . . . Dialogue and characterization are among the strong suits in Mazza’s emotionally charged novel, in which she demonstrates that the reciprocal capacity for devotion between dogs and humans is at least as powerful as the most self-serving and venal human motives."

- Library Journal

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"Mazza's language in this short story collection cuts right to the bone... With delicious satire, Mazza, a PEN Nelson Algren Award winner, illustrates our human frailties and oddities, showing us that keeping our eyes and hearts open is the best defense."

- Library Journal

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Literary sitcoms from hell... Ms. Mazza is a subversive, anarchistic writer... hardly forgettable.

- Wall Street Journal

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The theme of naming -- its difficulty, its arbitrariness, the potential for multiple names -- grounds Mazza's new novel, paradoxically, by unsettling it. In this narrative of female rage, the ambiguity of abuse and the difficulty of negotiating a meaningful life as a woman in America, the author of Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? stays with themes she has handled provocatively in the past and continues to work with passion, insight and a certain cold beauty.

- Publisher's Weekly

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Exposed

a novel by
by Cris Mazza

A deftly written, disturbing novel.

- Publisher's Weekly

A fascinating, unsettling tale.

- Booklist

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"...fictions that are remarkable for the force and freedom of their imaginative style."

—New York Times Book Review

"...similar to watching a porno flick and a game show simultaneously."

—Columbus Dispatch

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Pen/Nelson Algren Award Winner

"Talent jumps off her like an overcharge of electricity. . . . Mazza refuses to clarify, to give into realism or allegory. She prefers to let the ripples of her puzzle carry us into the murk at the edge of the pool. . . . To stir us with those lyrical, savage scenes."

- Los Angeles Times Book Review

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{These stories} are remarkable for the force and freedom of their imaginative style. Ms. Mazza's characterizations often have the stark quality of black-and-white sketches ('For a living, Jason sang in the opera. He was lovely and thin'). And her portraits of suffering are tempered with a fey humor.

- NYT Book Review

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