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Zoetrope: All-Story – Spring 2004

Volume 8 Number 1

Spring 2004

Lisa K. Buchanan

The edgy fiction in Zoetrope chronicles our hard-won (if dangerously tentative) status of humanity. Primal bullies lurk throughout the stories in this issue: a family simultaneously imprisons and abandons its defenseless, unmarried kin; a man exploits a toothless orphan reduced to turning tricks by the freeway, an anonymous driver works up a deadly malice.

The edgy fiction in Zoetrope chronicles our hard-won (if dangerously tentative) status of humanity. Primal bullies lurk throughout the stories in this issue: a family simultaneously imprisons and abandons its defenseless, unmarried kin; a man exploits a toothless orphan reduced to turning tricks by the freeway, an anonymous driver works up a deadly malice. Consistent with this issue’s theme of place, all protagonists grew up in/immigrated to/are visiting California. Fittingly, the guest designer is Wayne Thiebaud, whose works appear on 22 of the issue’s 106 pages and prove that a waterfall can be a street and the sky can be an honest yellow. While Zoetrope is one of only a noble few literary magazines to reprint classic short stories (one per issue), the unique angle in these pages is that the fiction has inspired a film and is presented with commentary by the author or filmmaker (i.e. Steven Spielberg, Mary Gaitskill and Hanif Kureishi) on the relationship between the two art forms. – LKB

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