Cris Mazza

Would her life have been better if she'd had sex with her supervisor when she was 23? Hester Smith is a woman who always played life near the sidelines-until she decides to rescue a teenage Mexican prostitute. She's up against the border sex trade in SouthernCalifornia that works like a drug cartel, where the smuggled contraband is teenage girls forced to work as prostitutes in undeveloped canyons just outside suburbia. Law enforcement agencies know it happens, as do investigative journalists, yet the illegal sex trade continues to exist. Most people, comfortable in their homes only miles away, express some brand of shock in the moment they hear about it-and then they go on with their lives, assured there's nothing they can do. While she prepares for the rescue, Hester discovers that the man with whom she almost had an affair-her mentor when she was a 23 year-old student teacher-had been simultaneously having a sexual relationship with a 16 year-old student. Hester mines her own memories of the would-be affair and ultimately tracks down the former 16 year-old. When these two women with a shared scandal in their pasts confront one another, the meeting coincides with the last step necessary to rescue the teenage prostitute Hester has tried to protect. It is only this mayhem that allows Hester to finally take ownership of her decisions and regrets.

The Decade of Letting Things Go is a book of linked essays containing still-relevant experiences that take place after the age of becoming socially and/or professionally invisible, as Cris Mazza searches for the elusive serenity of self-acceptance among a growing list of losses. Mazza’s story contains many of life’s expected losses: pets, parents, old mentors, and symbols of enduring natural places, as well as the loss of identities—child, student, partner, “successful” author. Some of her late-life experiences aren’t so easily categorized: having a mentally ill neighbor try to get her to come outside and fight; unpacking the complicity in thirty-year-old #MeToo incidents; “hooking up” with a “boy” from her teenaged past; struggling to accept that lifelong sexual dysfunction will never wane; realizing a deeply trusted mentor from forty-five years ago might be declining into dementia; plus a lifelong attachment to a childhood wound of having a “preferred child” as a sibling. Ultimately there is also the apparent loss of hope in ever finding contentment in the mark one makes in the world or in ever forming an identity that brings this abstract contentment—except that these have no expiration dates, and the exhausted author, at the end, is ready to keep looking.

A dazzling array of starshot across the sky from the brilliant Cris Mazza, who reminds us again and again that we must not only hold the line when it comes to our individual and community worth, but endlessly imagine a future. Cris Mazza makes feminism act like a verb, an ever-adapting organism, a space of change.

Cris Mazza's work has often been regarded as "disturbing" for its exploration of sexual politics, victimhood, personal accountability, and acts of sexual violence. With an introduction by Gina Frangello and a foreword by Rick Moody, Charlatan charts the development of a dynamic body of fiction by a writer due for discovery by millennial readers unsatisfied by mainstream feminism.

In the era just before computers, at the dawn of "safe sex," for a sub-generation of people who came of age without a war in Vietnam to unite them, the stories in Trickle-Down Timeline are glimpses into individual lives subtly influenced by the political and social milieu of the 1980's. For some people, the surplus and glut of the 80's were part of some other world, not theirs; and it couldn't be a "me-generation" if they didn't know who they were or where they were going. They were often just finding out what they were going to want; or they were, in starting out, already where they were going to end up.

Told in a broken shorthand voice, Mazza's language is acute, evoking a place where the patients, the caregivers, and the system are all disabled. Teri and Cleo are minimum-wage nurse-aides at a state ward for severely retarded and physically handicapped children. They are expected to feed, bathe, clothe, and carry out the required therapies for their patients in a 4-hour shift. They're working within a system where money for therapy is only continued if therapy shows improvement-and yet the state-paid therapists who oversee the ward know the patients will never show any improvement. To keep the money coming in, it is up to the minimum-wage caregivers to ""see"" and chart important improvements, thus keeping the therapy program alive. Blinded in their own way by their pet-like adoption of favorite patients, Teri and Cleo struggle to remain both optimistic and realistic. As their personal failures mount-and even transpose or emulate the travesties within the state ward-Teri and Cleo, with their own unseen ""disabilities"" in dealing with their lives and pasts, react harshly to the breakdown in the emotional balancing act.

A versatile and probing novelist, Mazza is at her clarion best in this riveting improvisation on the lost world chronicled in her memoir, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian (2003). Ronnie works in the geriatric hospital in which her stroke-afflicted father lives, but Medicare patients such as he are being forced to leave, and she decides that now is the time to attend to some mysterious, unfinished business involving the remains of her brother and mother, whose shocking deaths have so cruelly oppressed her. But their odd quest is interrupted by a pack of violent suburban teens. Rescued by a handsome and enigmatic migrant worker advocate, Ronnie and her father follow his lead and seek shelter deep in the canyons. As they struggle to survive, their tragic past unfolds in vivid flashbacks, and Mazza's mythic and mesmerizing tale charts the cruel paradoxes inherent in migrant workers' lives.

A wildlife biologist named Brian, observing a group of relocated cougars, attempts to repress the desires that he fears may make him a sex killer. In his struggle to understand himself, he finds an answer, but not without putting another at risk.

From the author of Revelation Countdown and Animal Acts, this collection of short stories conveys a sens e of the bewilderment and excitement of sexual desires. '

In this collection of stories, critically acclaimed writer Cris Mazza shines a kleig light on the dark underside of relationships in a disturbing look at the ambiguous nature of our own desires. From women who foster their own abusive relationships, to failed suicide attempts, to furtive -- and horribly violent -- encounters in steamy basements, Mazza's stories cut to the heart of doomed human relationships, landing squarely in the murky territory between desire and despair, between freedom and loss of control.

Mazza's bizarre 90s characters communicate better with their dogs than their lovers. Rich detail, dramatic conclusion!

In a striking first collection of stories, Cris Mazza brings a startling vision to the familiar terrain of intimate relationships. The eleven stories in Animal Acts describe characters navigating an unsteady course through the turbulence of sexial desire. Set in unmistakably American landscapes--from sprawling West Coast cities to the dry, dusty scrub of rural Southern California--the work is populated by gym teachers, aging flower children, secretaries and artists--most of them strong, willful women. The narrator of the title story holds the guests at a party spellbound with her fantastic retelling of another woman's perverse life--which may, in fact, be her own--thereby seducing a man who has previousley eluded her. Mazza's arresting narrative structures and sharp sense of the absurd make for a dazzling debut collection.

Forces readers to reexamine biases and consider the varying degrees of sexual harassment. "[A] narrative of female rage, the ambiguity of abuse, and the difficulty of negotiating a meaningful life as a woman in America . . . [Mazza] continues to work with passion, insight and a certain cold beauty."--Publishers Weekly

In a new novel as inventive as her earlier works, award-winning author Cris Mazza combines a mystery with an evocative story about one woman's precarious attempt to distinguish between reality and perception. "An admirable achievement."--Philadelphia Inquirer "A fascinating, unsettling tale."--Booklist

While in many ways reaffirming the mythic dimension of being on the road already romanticized in American pop and folk culture, Revelation Countdown also subtly undermines that view. These stories project onto the open road not the nirvana of personal freedom but rather a type of freedom more closely resembling loss of control. Being in constant motion and passing through new environments destabilizes life, casts it out of phase, heightens perception, skews reactions. Every little problem is magnified to overwhelming dimensions; events segue from slow motion to fast forward; background noises intrude, causing perpetual weehour insomnia. Imagination flourishes, often as an enemy: people suddenly discover that they never really understood their travelling companions. The formerly stable line of their lives veers off course. In such an atmosphere, the title Revelation Countdown, borrowed from a roadside sign in Tennessee, proves prophetic: It may not arrive at 7:30, but revelation will inevitably find the traveller.

Stories deal with the freedom of travel and the effects of travel on personality and relationships.

A PEN/Nelson Algren award winner, this intensely absorbing first novel of an artist told by his lover questions accepted notions of love, reality, and imagination. "A portrait of the artist as a young man in our times. Highly recommended."--Library Journal "Engaging and innovative."--Publishers Weekly