"A really strange and beautiful use of photography in experimental literature," writes Allison Meier, Where I Stay (TSky Press, 2009) is "compact prose set to the rhythm of poetry," a "both spare and sprawling interpretation" of "dislocated loneliness in being unmoored, in drifting away from connections and places until you become stuck somewhere again."
At Gently Read Literature, Francis Raven reviews Andrew Zornoza's *Where I Stay* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009): "Forces a place to emerge, a place that is perhaps equivalent with a narrative, but one that cannot be pinned to the ground."
The Black Sheep Dances reviews Andrew Zornoza’s *Where I Stay* (Tarpauin Sky Press): "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: much like the words he chooses to describe his interactions and his reactions to it all.... An excellent collection.... It reminded me somewhat of Sam Shepherd's Day Out of Days."
At Powell's, via Rain Taxi, John Madera reviews Andrew Zornoza's *Where I Stay* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009): "Zornoza's narrator, with a languorous but precise lyricism, traverses the Mid- and Southwestern United States, telling tales of greasy, smoky bus terminals and truck stops.... He selects details with a jeweler's precision, endowing them with symbolic meaning and using rhythmic prose that twists and turns like the many roads on which his narrator travels.... 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."
Review of Contemporary Fiction on Andrew Zornoza's *Where I Stay*: "Squarely situated between the ethos of Jack Kerouac and Walker Evans. Where I Stay is a novel of almost pure voice, told in diaristic fragments coupled with photographs whose captions are drawn from other moments in the time of the narrative. . . . a young man moving aimlessly through an America moving violently through him. In and out of cars, of the arms of lovers, looking for someone he lost, for a moment of rest. . . A year passes, days and weeks omitted, blank spaces where the lives of criminals, kind families, abandoned dogs and factory workers continue to be lived. . . . Those who filled his world he can now find 'only in the cracks.'"
At elimae, John Findura reviews Andrew Zornoza's *Where I Stay* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009): "Andrew Zornoza's marvelous first book is hard to pin down. It seamlessly shifts its delivery from straight-ahead to a possibly unreliable photographer with captions that either expand on the text, or further question the reality and relationship between prose and picture.... 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.... Andrew Zornoza does it with style and grace."
At Bookslut, Blake Butler interviews Andrew Zornoza (*Where I Stay*): "The novel has an advantage in its lack of immediacy. A book that takes years to write... it takes a set of feelings and thoughts and silences that have profoundly evolved over time. Some people would have you believe that the novel is in trouble as an art form. The novel isn't in trouble -- making money off the novel is in trouble."
We're delighted to report that Andrew Zornoza's *Where I Stay* is hanging tough at #7 on SPD's Fiction Bestsellers list, and Ana Bozicevic's *Stars of the Night Commute* receives not one but five shoutouts at No Tell Motel's "Best Poetry Books of 2009" list.
At NewPages, Cynthia Reeser provides a brilliant review of Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009): "Zornoza finds meaning not only in the land and in travel, but conveys what is derived via both ordinary moments and dysfunctional situations: A man is fired from a road crew; a bleary narrator wakes from a heroin dream next to a bleeding body and nods off again; male prostitutes tread carefully around a new recruit....Zornoza’s use of fragments of image and narration is expert. 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...."