9th Ave: Rebecca Rukeyser with Oscar Villalon

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“I didn’t realize how much I needed this lusty, funny, heartbreaking book until I devoured it in a single sitting. The Seaplane on Final Approach is a novel set at the edge of the world, about people who belong everywhere and nowhere and the vast, unknowable wilderness of desire. A sharp, flawless debut. Sexy and dark and strange and absolutely perfect.”
—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House and Her Body & Other Parties

“An age-old story—puppy love meets jaded lust to dance their death spiral inside a young woman’s head—told with the shameless authenticity of 2022. I ate it up.”
—Nell Zink, author of Doxology

Mira has been hired for the season as the lodge’s baker and housekeeper. But she’s also busy gleefully nursing twin obsessions: building a working theory of what constitutes “sleaze” and pursuing a young fisherman she deems the embodiment of all things deliciously sleazy. Her plans become more perverse and elaborate, even as life on Lavender Island starts to unravel.

By midseason, it becomes clear that Stu, the jovial, predatory patriarch of the lodge, has turned his sexual attentions to another young employee. As the mood of the lodge spirals into chaos, the inhabitants realize just how isolated Lavender Island really is.

Hilarious, sensual, and charged with menace, The Seaplane on Final Approach brilliantly illuminates the mirage-thin line between the artificial and the feral. In this daring and psychologically razor-sharp debut, Rukeyser’s characters tear aside the facade of good manners to reveal all of our deepest needs and naked desires.

Rebecca Rukeyser is the recipient of the inaugural Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature. Her fiction has appeared in such publications as ZYZZYVA, The Massachusetts Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She earned her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches fiction writing at Bard College Berlin.

Oscar Villalon is the managing editor at ZYZZYVA. His writing has appeared in Freeman’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, Literary Hub, and other publications.

Reflecting the values that make San Francisco a cultural beacon, ZYZZYVA publishes a literary journal defined by its risk-taking and egalitarianism, and by its focus on inclusivity and excellence.

With each issue, ZYZZYVA offers a meaningful consideration of the most urgent ethical concerns of our time, in part via themed issues on topics ranging from resistance, the border, and art to the environment, labor, and technology. We create substantial space for poetry, nonfiction, interviews, fiction, and art from an array of voices, resulting in a lively, thoughtful conversation in print, online, and in-person, across genres and generations, answering the need for a unique kind of engagement.