Leni Zumas

It's a rare writer who can bring us closer to people we might cross the street to avoid.

Above all else, these stories charm. It’s an auspicious debut...
Zumas's penchant for rhythmic language and experimentation is paralleled (and possibly influenced) by her work as a drummer. Her Brooklyn-based band, S-S-S-Spectres, plays what she calls “scratchy yelpy semi-dancey post-punk,” and sings songs about “voodoo, the supernatural and the nautical.”

Her literary subject matter often follows suit, focusing on the culture of rebellious musicians, rock clubs and “trapped people.” Zumas's stories deal with suicide and bleeding rectums, and take place in rehab centers and towns that don't exist on maps—microcosms of the great community of solitude.

Like powerful music, the phenomenon of Zumas's fiction happens when the rhythms are perfectly in time with the pitch of loneliness. She pounds away at her words until they make a melancholy sound.
Leni Zumas can dance very well in a shoebox. It’s a beautiful shoebox. Some dancers lean on the shoebox walls, holding on for gravity, afraid to fall down, because if they were freed and onstage, they know they would collapse; other times, they only begin in shoeboxes, but look forward to the day when they escape, because they will flower and explode. Will she flower or fall down? It’s hard to be sure, but this reviewer looks for flowers. I would be glad to see Leni Zumas onstage.
Once you start staring into the verbal abyss that is FAREWELL NAVIGATOR ... you'll be absorbed by a shape-shifting combination of "gory details" and uplifting turning points, by gothic fairytale scenarios blended with the surreal richness of the seemingly mundane. And luckily, you'll occasionally discover some hope and moments of triumphant insights.
The stories in Leni Zumas’s debut collection, Farewell Navigator, deal in the familiar stuff of awkward adolescence—getting your heart broken, wanting to run away from home, squabbling with your parents. But in the same way that Sonic Youth mucked with obscure guitar tunings and still found a way into pop music, Zumas has a knack for telling stories with a familiar ring in a surpassingly strange manner. (As it happens, Zumas plays drums for S-S-S-Spectres, a woolly Brooklyn postpunk band that’d fit just fine on a Sonic Youth bill.)
“A salt-worthy story isn’t about something—it is that something itself,” says Horace, the “Everything Hater” of one of the ten short stories included in Farewell Navigator by Leni Zumas. None of the stories is less than excellent. A few, like “How He Was a Wicked Son,” are memorable. Leni Zumas is not just a good storyteller. She speaks with her own language, that’s never plain, but always dry and dense, with a broken rhythm, a tension that never explodes and gives to the phrases a strange, haunting beauty. People in these stories are unhappy, and unhappiness has a thousand shades. There is something of Flannery O’Connor’s gothic in Farewell Navigator, but Zumas has a voice that doesn’t sound like anything else, a prose that is both lyrical and brutally humorous. The characters are not just their thoughts, they are sculpted by language, which is their own words and also the dialog of the world they live in. Everybody is trapped in a sort of lullaby, and the only way to go is to sing along. Farewell Navigator is a dark jewel.
Recommended for those who like to reads words that induce queasiness, flights of fancy and dreams of witches howling from the tops of mountains.
Zumas writes with an uncanny aptitude for the intense visceral thoughts, emotions, compulsions, and reactions that accompany dealing in the realm of daily experience. Her narrators and characters tug at their own skins, enter the anatomies of others, and, from the various parts discovered, voice surreal, poetic expressions that contain true sensations.
Attention unrequited lovers, sisters of suicidal brothers, children of the legally blind: you are not alone. Leni Zumas understands your quiet agony and describes it with such wry, unflinching familiarity that even the gory details ring true. If darkness has ever been your friend, your story is in here.
Leni Zumas’s writing is fearless and swift, sassy and sensational.
I have never read stories like Leni Zumas’s before and I can't get them out of my head. Her language is real sorcery—it dismantles the world you think you know and takes you to strange, fecund territories of the imagination. Sentence by sentence, Leni creates worlds so vivid and fever-bright that you forget you're reading words on a page and begin to see real plums, scars, black stars lashed to the bottom of canoes. Her characters are girls and boys in bad trouble, who feel as close to you and as far from you as the black sheep in your own family.
Leni Zumas is a wonder, an alchemist, a witch. She brews a wild elixir in these stories, which take you where you never thought to go. Here are mothers infatuated with astronauts and dragons; here is a girl suckling elvers and owlets. Here is the body unspooling and nibbled at, the body undone and made fast again with the strength of the wish to be loved. Something’s timely in these stories and hip, and yet they let us fall out of time. Fall into sorrow and be lifted again. What a blessing—to succumb to Zumas’s power, to these gorgeous, beguiling songs.