In her introduction to New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008, ZZ Packer, co-editor of the collection, calls the American South “a land of contrasts.” “There’s the sweet tea, and the ...

CERTAIN topics in black America are taboo. Things talked about in hushed corners but not publicly acknowledged. Faults of the black church. Black people who are gay and lesbian. Issues surrounding ...

ZZ Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” a surprisingly honest anthology of eight short stories imbued with a masterly command of language, has dazzled, and continues to dazzle, audiences. Packer, ...

ZZ Packer reads Stuart Dybek's "Paper Lantern," and discusses it with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. "Paper Lantern" was published in the November 27, 1995, issue of The New Yorker ...

Some of the eight stories in ZZ Packer’s debut collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead), feature ambitious young African-Americans looking to improve their lives: in “Our Lady of Peace” ...

The current take on writer ZZ Packer as hip, as a fresh voice of the disenfranchised, began edging toward critical mass when the chroniclers of style -- Vogue, Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine, ...

I read John Updike’s “Rabbit at Rest” while in Japan, and quickly worked my way backwards to the rest of the “Rabbit” quartet, and eventually through all of Updike’s stories. There seemed to me not ...

Famed short-story writer Z.Z. Packer will be reading at 7 to 8 p.m., Friday Nov. 11 at Claver Hall Recital Hall at Regis University, 51st and Lowell Blvd. in Denver ...

The “Best American Short Stories” series may get all the attention, but “New Stories From the South” has published an impressive array of heavyweights since its inception, in 1986—including Rick Bass, ...