by Z. Z. Packer
Thanks to Mara Folz for being my first reader and fan; to Felicia Ward for those many “writing dates.” Faith Adiele, LJ Jesse, Angela Pneuman, Cate Marvin, and my sister Jamila are the best friends a girl can have.
Special thanks to the fine editors at The New Yorker, Cressida Leyshon and Bill Buford, who took a chance on a young unknown; to Colin Harrison and Barbara Jones at Harper’s; and last but not least, to the wise and intrepid Lois Rosenthal at Story.
Finally, heartfelt thanks to the wonderful Eric Simonoff, who does triple duty as agent, reader, and friend; to Venetia van Kuffeler, the fab assistant to my editor at Riverhead, Cindy Spiegel, whose time, patience, and skill made this book what it is; and to Michael Boros, without whose love I wouldn’t be.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines, where these stories first appeared, some in a slightly different form: Harper’s: “Brownies”; Ploughshares: “Every Tongue Shall Confess”; Story: “Our Lady of Peace”; The New Yorker: “The Ant of the Self,” “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”; Zoetrope All-Story: “Doris Is Coming.”
“Brownies” also appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2000; “Our Lady of Peace” in Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts; “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” in Here Lies, edited by David Gilbert; “Speaking in Tongues” in The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, edited by Tom Grimes. “Geese” originally appeared in Twenty-five and Under.
About the Author
DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE
ZZ PACKER is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’
Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’
Award, and was selected for the New Yorker’s debut
fiction issue in 2002.
A graduate of Yale, she was a Jones lecturer at
Stanford University. She lives in the San Francisco
Bay area.
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2004 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books
Originally published in the United States of America in 2003
by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
Copyright © ZZ Packer, 2003
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental
Lyrics from ‘The Brownie Smile Song’, words and music by Harriet Haywood, and ‘Make New Friends’, from The Ditty Bag by Janet E. Tobitt, are used by permission of Girl Scouts of the USA
Lines from ‘Autobiographia Literaria’ by Frank O’Hara, from his Collected Poems, copyright © 1971 by Maureeen Granville-Smith, Administratix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, are used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 677 1
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