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new in 2009
Red Hen Press
Trickle-Down Timeline
In the era just before computers, at the dawn of "safe sex," for a sub-generation of people who came of age without a war in Vietnam to unite them, the stories in Trickle-Down Timeline are glimpses into individual lives subtly influenced by the political and social milieu of the 1980s. For some people, the surplus and glut of the 80's were part of some other world, not theirs; and it couldn't be a "me-generation" if they didn't know who they were or where they were going. They were often just finding out what they were going to want; or they were, in starting out, already where they were going to end up.
"Cris Mazza's considerable genius is that she sees what the rest of us are unwilling to see and says what we are unable to say. The stories in Trickle-Down Timeline are bold, risky, and exhilarating. Mazza explores the brave new world of the eighties with unflinching honesty and with a narrative virtuosity that both entrances and unsettles. What talent, what nerve, what an achingly beautiful collection."
John Dufresne
Author of Requiem, Mass
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2007
Soft Skull Press
Waterbaby
a novel
by Cris Mazza
Waterbaby is a story of transcending the limitations of illness and the emotionally limiting world of the family.
Shipwrecks, doomed lovers, family secrets, sea-babies, toilet-babies, and historical-reenactment sex are but a few of the facets of this deftly kaleidoscopic novel. With Waterbaby, Cris Mazza shows us how, through resuscitating our pasts, and rescuing each other, we might just save ourselves.
Alex Shakar
author of The Savage Girl
A gripping tale of compulsion, obsession, and forgiveness, set so evocatively amidst the fogs and furies of the offseason Maine coast. Waterbaby is also an intriguing exploration of the ways in which our ancestral pasts echo within our own psyches.
Lisa Alther
(author of Kinflicks and Bedrock)
"...packs a lingering wallop."
Kirkus Reviews
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2005
FC2
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.
"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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2005
Chiasmus Press
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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2004
Red Hen Press
Homeland
a novel by Cris Mazza
A woman takes her stroke-victim father out of a geriatric hospital to go look for the site of a family tragedy that happened over three decades before. By the end of their journey, they not only experience but are influential factors in a brushfire inferno and a Columbine-like attack on migrant workers -- both part of an apocalypse of hate, but which stand in sharp contrast to the woman's visceral yet pastoral memories of love and death in a secluded, devoted family. In a story about contemporary survival and familial bonds, a family secret reveals how random tragedy was allowed to benumb idyllic family unity -- even debilitate the foundation of a family's strength -- but ultimately it never destroyed the potency and power the woman discovers in the bond that remains.
"A versatile and probing novelist, Mazza is at her clarion best in this riveting improvisation on the lost world chronicled in her memoir, Indigenous: Growing up Californian (2003). Ronnie works in the geriatric hospital in which her stroke-afflicted father lives, but Medicare patients such as he are being forced to leave, and she decides that now is the time to attend some mysterious, unfinished business involving the remains of her brother and mother, whose shocking deaths have so cruelly oppressed her. But their odd quest is interrupted by a pack of violent suburban teens. Rescued by a handsome and enigmatic migrant worker advocate, Ronnie and her father follow his lead and seek shelter deep in the canyons. As they struggle to survive, their tragic past unfolds in vivid flashbacks, and Mazza's mythic and mesmerizing tale charts the cruel paradoxes inherent in migrant worker's lives. Vital in its intimacy with the earth and archetypal in its sorrows and redemption, Mazza's arresting novel harmonizes with tales by Susan Straight, Antonya Nelson, and newcomer Joseph Coulson."
Donna Seaman
Booklist
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2003
City Lights Books
Indigenous:
Growing Up
Californian
A collection of personal essays by Cris Mazza
Cris Mazza's stunning memoir, Indigenous, worries the notions of belonging, of belonging for a place and of longing for the memories of same. Her tales of her native California expertly excavate an always surprising and always rewarding experience cache. It is a book about scourging, scouring, and scoring (in the musical sense) the stuff, the scraps that make up the worlds we remember and the worlds we inherit.
Michael Martone
author of The Flatness and Other Landscapes
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2001
FC2
Girl Beside Him
a novel by Cris Mazza
"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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1997
Coffee House Press
Dog People
a novel by Cris Mazza
"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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1997
FC2
Former Virgin
a collection of short stories
by Cris Mazza
"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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1991 & 1998
FC2
Is It
Sexual
Harrassment Yet?
a collection of stories by by Cris Mazza
Literary sitcoms from hell... Ms. Mazza is a subversive, anarchistic writer... hardly forgettable.
Wall Street Journal
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1995
Coffee House Press
Your Name Here
a novel by by Cris Mazza
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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1994
Coffee House Press
Exposed
a novel by by Cris Mazza
A deftly written, disturbing novel.
Publisher's Weekly
A fascinating, unsettling tale.
Booklist
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1993
FC2/Black Ice Books
Revelation Countdown
a collection of stories by by Cris Mazza
"...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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1992
Coffee House Press
How to Leave a Country
a novel by by Cris Mazza
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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1989
FC2
Animal Acts
a collection of stories by by Cris Mazza
{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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