Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

The acclaimed debut short story collection that introduced the world to an arresting and unforgettable new voice in fiction, from multi-award winning author ZZ Packer

Her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident: Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decide where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream.

With penetrating insight, ZZ Packer helps us see the world with a clearer vision. Fresh, versatile, and captivating, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking and unforgettable collection, sure to stand out among the contemporary canon of fiction.

Author: Zz Packer
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 02/03/2004
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781573223782
Audience: Young Adult

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 5.9
Point Value: 11
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 84285 / Drinking Coffee Elsewhere


Award: Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award - Finalist


Review Citation(s):
New York Times 02/01/2004 pg. 20
Booklist 04/01/2004 pg. 1360

About the Author
ZZ Packer's stories have appeared in The New Yorker (where she was launched as a debut writer), Harper's and Story, have been published in The Best American Short Stories, and have been read on NPR's Selected Shorts. Packer is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. A graduate of Yale, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the Writing Seminar at Johns Hopkins University, she has been a Wallace Stenger-Truman Capote fellow and a Jones lecturer at Stanford University.