Question 1

Who is ZZ Packer and why has she published only one book?

Accepted Answer

Zuwena 'ZZ' Packer (born 1973) is an American writer who published Drinking Coffee Elsewhere to widespread critical acclaim in 2003 and was immediately recognized as a major talent — The New Yorker, where she had published stories, included her in its 20 under 40 list in 2010, and she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and been a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. She has been working on a novel for many years; she has discussed the difficulty of following a critically acclaimed debut collection and the challenges of sustaining the sustained focus that novel writing requires alongside teaching and other obligations. Several of the stories from Drinking Coffee Elsewhere were originally published in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories, which gave her a substantial readership before the collection appeared. The long silence since her debut is frustrating to readers who admired the collection, but it is also a reminder that the careers of Black women writers in American literature are not always continuous or commercially simple, regardless of critical recognition.

Question 2

What connects the stories in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere?

Accepted Answer

The stories in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere are not explicitly linked — they have different characters, different settings, and different narrative modes — but they are connected by a preoccupation with what happens to young Black women when they enter institutions that were not built for them: the Yale dining hall in the title story, the Brownie troop in 'Brownies,' the summer camp in 'Speaking in Tongues,' the Japanese internment site in 'Doris Is Coming.' In each case, the institution has its own norms and expectations that the Black female protagonist has not been prepared for and cannot simply absorb; the stories are organized around the friction between the protagonist's interiority and the institution's indifference to that interiority. Packer is also consistently interested in the question of what the protagonist does with that friction: some of her characters deflect it with humor, some with anger, some with a kind of ironic detachment that is itself a form of survival. The collection's formal range — comic in some stories, tragic in others, formally experimental in the title story — reinforces the sense that the protagonist's response is always chosen, never simply given.

Question 3

What is the title story "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" about?

Accepted Answer

The title story follows Dina, a Black freshman at Yale who, after a group therapy exercise goes wrong, is assigned to a therapist and begins a series of sessions that trace her difficulty with intimacy, her rejection of the social world of Yale, and her conflicted relationship with her roommate Heidi, a white girl from Ohio. The story is notable for the quality of its portrait of Dina's intelligence and for the precision with which it renders the specific awkwardness of a brilliant, alienated young Black woman at a predominantly white institution; Dina's combination of hostility and longing, her refusal to be the kind of person Yale expects her to be, and her inability to simply opt out of wanting connection are rendered without sentimentality or false resolution. The story ends without the redemption or the community that the Yale experience supposedly provides; Dina is left with the same question she started with: whether there is a way to be in the world that doesn't require her to be someone other than who she is. It is one of the defining stories in contemporary American short fiction about the experience of being Black at elite institutions.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere Reading Order

Complete Drinking Coffee Elsewhere Book List