Andrew Zornoza
Where I Stay

ISBN: 9780977901913
Fiction, Photo Essay
8"x6", 108 pages, paperback
Publication date: June 2009
Tarpaulin Sky Press
    

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In the process of constantly disappearing, the unhinged, unmoored and unnamed narrator of Where I Stay travels through a cracked North America, stalked by his own future self and the whispers of a distant love. From Arco, Idaho to Mexico City, he flees along the highways and dirt roads of a landscape filled with characters in transition: squatters, survivalists, prostitutes, drug runners, skinheads, border guards and con-men. Where I Stay is a meditation on desperation, identity, geography, memory, and love—a story about endurance, about the empty spaces in ourselves, about the new possibilities we find only after we have lost everything.

Praise for Where I Stay

Refreshing, pitch-perfect kind of steering that is innovative not only for the genre it might get called into, but for experiential and language-focused texts of every stripe.
—Blake Butler, HTML Giant

Consider Andrew Zornoza’s Where I Stay a loose retelling of Werner Herzog’s 1974 march from Munich to Paris to try to save a dying friend—only set in the arid, ominous nowherescape of the contemporary Southwest and composed by a strung-out W.G. Sebald. Zornoza dedicates the book to “all those he's lied to” before prosecuting a narrative in stark photographs and crisp, lurid text that will make you wish we had more liars like him in the world.
—Matthew Derby

A gifted journey through borderlands between text and image, glassy prose and suggestively indirect prose poem, facts and fictions, sanity and the other thing, but most of all those borderlands crossed and recrossed on the West's back roads—the kind that always exist just off the grid, just below the radar, and always in beautiful pieces.
—Lance Olsen

As haunting as it is gritty, Where I Stay has the feel of an impressionist watercolor and underscores the value of the small press in literary culture. Indeed, I hesitate to simply call it a book; its ambitions, beautifully realized, make it a hybrid of textual and visual arts.
—Small Press Reviews

    

Excerpts from Where I Stay

Interviews with Andrew Zornoza

"Writers have been bending fact and fiction for quite a while. I’m not quite sure where this mania to discover the exact point the ride starts and stops comes from. . . . I’ve spent some time living in a van, sure. Who hasn’t? Living in your car seemed déclassé at one point. Now that we’ve learned that Raymond Carver and Vladimir Nabakov preferred to write while sitting in parked cars, it’s less of a trespass."
—read the full interview at Bookish Us

About Andrew Zornoza

Andrew Zornoza is a visual artist and writer born in Houston, Texas and now residing in Brooklyn. His fiction and essays have appeared in magazines such as Sleepingfish, Confrontation, Porcupine Literary Arts, CapGun, Matter Magazine, Gastronomica and H.O.W. He can be found teaching writing at The New School University and fiction at Gotham Writer’s Workshop.