Reviews for "Where
I Stay"
"Zornoza's knack for rendering the momentary in timeless, syllabic lines, to cut to the blood of the line in an effortless, truly fevered sort of way, is not only refreshing, it is unforgettable. . . ."
HTML GIANT, Blake Butler
"Something to be studied by fellow photographers as much as it is to be simply enjoyed."
The Chicago Center for Literature and Photography by Jason Pettus
"Zornoza manages to capture that wanderlust that has caught anyone who ever read On The Road, or realized you
can get on Route 80 West and drive from New York to San Francisco. It's sad and searching, filled with the desire for
experience for reasons we may not even know. As Antoine de St. Exupery wrote in Le Petit Prince, "Grown-ups never understand
anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children
to be always and forever explaining things to them." This, Zornoza does this with style and grace. . . ."
John Findura at Elimae
"And then what? And then the book is inside of us, or at least its contents are, emptied from the fine container Zornoza has built for all of his narrator's contradictions and complications, his precise phrasing and beautiful mistakes."
"The movement of people and lives; chance meetings between strangers destined never to cross paths again; moments that can never be recreated; the uncertainty of people, place, relationships — all collide across culture and class, gender and race to form an anthem of displacement. The author deftly — and in spite of himself, seamlessly — weaves common threads that, by the end of the book, form a recognizable whole. Where I Stay is a story of a search for a home, for permanence, and ultimately for meaning."
Cynthia Reeser, critic at New Pages
"There are a few snapshots of people, none of whom receive the heroic
treatment of Walker Evans' sharecroppers. Only the occasional landscape
image offers a possible solace — the open sky, the sunset, the forests
that consume the old shacks and abandoned automobiles. . . ."
Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald, Terry Pitts
"One of the reasons why Where I Stay is so successful is because of Zornoza's ability to navigate and weave together fully fleshed sentences along with airy lines of staccato. Zornoza's prose has range, which is what makes this book at times so beautiful and at other times so devastating."
Steven Karl at Lovers' Last Go Around
"This definitely isn't the scenic route: Zornoza's travels take him to the edge of urban life, mainly concentrating on the rough roads and deserted highways that have been left in the past by time and progress. The landscape is grey, gritty, and jagged . . . there's sadness within it all, yet the traveller continues. Much like an epic quest, he keeps pursuing that which he cannot identify"
Amy Henry at The Black Sheep Dances
"SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Yes. Three times."
Sean Lovelace,
author of
How Some People Like Their Eggs
"Here, nothing is anchored. Even the black borders of the photographs, those supposed documents of a reality experienced, are themselves unhinged and moving on a trajectory. . . ."
The Review of Contemporary Fiction by Michelle Tupko
Zornoza’s stories sprawl across landscapes. Superfluous exposition is replaced by evocative gestures, bland dialogue surrenders to resonant internal monologue . . . As such, Zornoza is as much a novelist as he is a cartographer of loneliness, doubt, and fear, one that fearlessly delineates the stark realms of disappointment, unrequited love, and unfulfilled dreams.
RAIN TAXI Review of Books, John Madera
"Indeed, I hesitate to simply call it a book; its ambitions, beautifully realized, make it a hybrid of textual and visual arts. Like all of my favorite works of art, Where I Stay has the capacity to evoke something akin to an out of body experience, to propel the reader into unfamiliar territory. . . ."
Marc Shuster at Small Press Reviews
More praise for "Where I Stay"
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, author of Hideous Beauties, Nietzsche's Kisses, Anxious Pleasures and others
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, author of Super Flat Times
Andrew Zornoza writes with the precision of a poet and delicately creates a haunting, glowing world of dreams and beauty. The language and images of "Where I Stay" make you want to step inside the pages, to travel down the road with the author. Books like this remind us of what true art really looks like.
Martin Hyatt, author of A Scarecrow's Bible and winner of the Edmund White award