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Drinking Coffee Elsewhere | 
| Author: Zz Packer
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Rating:  56 reviews
Sales Rank: 155947
Media: Paperback
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 1573223786
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781573223782
ASIN: 1573223786
Publication Date: February 3, 2004
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Amazon.com Review
An outstanding debut story collection, Z.Z. Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere has attracted as much book-world buzz as a triple espresso. Yet, surprisingly, there are no gimmicks in these eight stories. Their combination of tenderness, humor, and apt, unexpected detail set them apart. In the title story (published in the New Yorker's summer 2000 Debut Fiction issue), a Yale freshman is sent to a psychotherapist who tries to get her--black, bright, motherless, possibly lesbian--to stop "pretending," when she is sure that "pretending" is what got her this far. "Speaking in Tongues" describes the adventures of an Alabama church girl of 14 who takes a bus to Atlanta to try to find the mother who gave her up. Looking around the Montgomery Greyhound station, she wonders if it has changed much since the Reverend King's days. She "tried to imagine where the 'Colored' and 'Whites Only' signs would have hung, then realized she didn't have to. All five blacks waited in one area, all three whites in another." Packer's prose is wielded like a kitchen knife, so familiar to her hand that she could use it with her eyes shut. This is a debut not to miss. --Regina Marler
Product Description
Audie Award Finalist!
A remarkable debut short-story collection by a fresh and captivating new voice in American literature.
Z.Z. Packer's first collection of short stories is rich with unexpected turns, indelible images, and penetrating insight that belies someone so young. Her stories plunge us into the worlds of people living on the edge and to the flashpoints that make or break them, that shape their worldviews forever. In The Stranger, a third-grade girl tries to find her place in the microcosm of summer camp in the larger world in 1981 during the height of the Atlanta child murders. The girl's bathroom at camp is the setting for a clash between an all-black and an all-white Brownie troop in Brownies. Two young women prod the boundaries of friendship and love in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.
A highly anticipated debut from an award-winning young writer.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 51 more reviews...
 Beautiful September 20, 2008
Kevin Casey Mcavey
Beautiful and breath-taking. Ms. Packer is a truly gifted story teller and a keen observer of the world around her.
Refreshing & thought-provoking January 3, 2008
Shelia D. Harvey (Houston, Texas)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere was my "car" read; a book I could read under the dryer at the beauty shop, provided it was a slow conversation day. I read the story about Brownies, which touches so much: leading versus following, speaking up, the paranoia of race, and the fun and stress of Brownie camp. I laughed, reflected, and moved the book from my car to my nightstand. Excellent read. Aww Sookie Sookie: Omar's Revenge
A Story With A Don Quixote Flavor December 30, 2007
Story Circle Book Reviews (www.storycirclebookreviews.org)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
ZZ Packer is a gutsy, tough, funny, wise-beyond-her-years young writer. Always an outsider, a brainy black girl living a segregated life, she views the world from which she came and the world to which she has entry with a sensitivity beyond her years. In "Speaking in Tongues," one gets the feeling her character would like to be able to prove herself within her church and her family by speaking in tongues, but it just doesn't happen. And while she remains an outsider in that regard, she and her friend Marcelle are "the only saved students in Rutherford B. Hayes High, roaming the halls together in their ankle-length skirts, their long-sleeved ruffled blouses while the others watched." The rest of the story is a fairy tale that might have actually happened--rural girl runs away to the big city and finally, after misadventure after misadventure, returns home relatively intact. The story has a Don Quixote flavor to it.
Then there is Doris in "Doris is Coming", watching television with old Stutz in his shop, viewing integration with Dr. Martin Luther King somewhere else. Oh, she gets ideas that no nice Pentecostal girl should have. After much thought, even consultation with her preacher, she decides to do a one-[almost] woman sit-in at Clovee's Five and Dime.
She sits even after being told that she can not be served. She takes out her World History book and starts to read. No one throws her out; no one pays much attention to her. "When Doris closed her book, about to leave, she said, 'I just want you to know I'm leaving now. Not because you're making me or because I feel intimidated or anything. I just have to get home now.' She starts for home. She knew that she should hurry, but she couldn't. She had to stop and look. The sky had just turned her favorite shade of barely lit blue, the kind that came to windows when you couldn't get back to sleep but couldn't quite pry yourself awake."
Packer writes complicated, thoughtful stories with skill and surprises. She introduces me to a world I do not know.
by Judith Helburn
for StorycircleBookReviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women
A new voice reminiscent of Baldwin and O'Connor September 12, 2007
D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
It's been several months since I read the eight stories in "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere," and I can still recall the precision and beauty of ZZ Packer's prose, the building tension in several scenes, and the uniqueness of the outsiders who populate her stories. Although hers is a vibrant, new voice all its own, Packer echoes the rawness of Baldwin's stories in "Going to Meet the Man," while her alienated protagonists recall the redemption-seekers of Flannery O'Connor's fiction. Like both of her literary predecessors, Packer doesn't always feel the need to elucidate why her characters behave as they do; instead, actions and their consequences are burdened by personal histories, human emotions, and social expectations that are often beyond explanation. "I don't know why I said it," Dina reflects in the title story. "Until that moment I'd been good in all the ways that were meant to matter."
What Dina said, during her college freshman orientation games, was that the one "inanimate object" she'd want to be is a revolver--a response that launches a chain of events that insures her status as an outcast. One imagines that if she had been a white, football-playing fraternity brother, her quip would have been taken as a cynical if inappropriate attempt at sarcasm. But she is a young black girl from a poor part of Baltimore, and her retort is filtered through the alien prep-school eyes of her new classmates and teachers. She is doomed not to fit in.
In "Brownies," another story with a similar theme, the tables are turned: a Brownie troop plans ways to taunt the summer camp's "Disney characters," a group of white girls with "complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla"--only to find that their would-be victims are not who they seem to be. In Packer's world, as in the real one, behavior is predicated not only by personal choices but also by social pressures, societal prejudices, and the near-inevitability of misapprehension.
In addition to the title story, there are two other stories here that rank among the best I've read in recent years. "Speaking in Tongues" describes a 14-year-old runaway who escapes to Atlanta from the confines of her religious rural upbringing, falls under the sway of a streetwalker and a hustler, and becomes part of their sensual, harrowing existence. The "Ant of the Self," the story from The New Yorker that introduced me to Packer's world several years ago, concerns a young man, Spurgeon, whose father, freshly bailed out of prison, corrals him on a journey to the Million Man March to sell exotic birds to the crowd (selling birds!?! --the eccentricities again evoke O'Connor). Here, an exasperated son's destiny is limited by his love-hate relationship with his father; it's easy enough for an "outsider" to say what Spurgeon should have done but family ties can mess up anything. (" 'Why you gotta act like everything I ask you to do is gonna kill you? You my son. I tell you to do something, you obey.' I do obey, and hate myself for it....")
I've outlined my favorites, but there's not a rotten apple in the bunch. Savored one at a time, they most clearly bear out Mavis Gallant's advice for readers: "Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait."
 Regretful August 29, 2007
Dan Belcher (Kansas City)
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I tried so hard to read this book. I really did. I trudged through several chapters and then gave up and donated it to my local coffee shop library.
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