Illinois Authors

Fiction Collective, New York : ©1988.

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.

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.

FC2, Tallahassee, FL : ©2005.

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.

Coffee House Press, Minneapolis : ©1997.

The romances of dog lovers. Fanny is an interior decorator, Scott is a caterer, and both are unhappily married. They meet in a park while exercising their dogs and have an affair. Subsequently, Fanny meets a lesbian who wants to breed a dog and another affair follows.

Coffee House Press ; Minneapolis : 1994.

Photographer Conni Zamora is hired to take publicity photos for a theatre in San Diego. As she goes about her assignment, differences emerge between her point of view as a photographer and that of the cast. A study in perception. By the author of How to Leave a Country.

FC2, Normal, IL : 1997.

In her latest 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.

FC2, Normal [Ill.] : ©2001.

Cris Mazza's fiction has been called experimental, and stylistically it is, in the same way that Chekov's prose can be called experimental. Like the Russian author, Mazza uses an impressionistic technique to create characters so unusual, they become emblems for whole orders of social ills. Unfolding with the grim assurance of an autopsy, Girl Beside Him lays bare pathologies of self and society. As the novel unfolds, a moody naturalist obsessed with target shooting meets his pretty assistant, rebounding from her bitter divorce, via a classified ad. Brian and Leya work together in the Wyoming outback, a landscape quick with beauty, death and sex. Ostensibly they have joined forces to track wild cougar, but humanity is the most endangered species here. As the story lopes along, the naturalists, made feral by heartbreak and the drone of pop culture, spend the summer tracking cougars.... Taking Sartre's aphorism, hell is other people, to new, dreadful extremes, Mazza's varmits know that the only thing wrong with any landscape is who else is living in it. From deep inside her character's skins, Mazza brings a psychological awareness to her novel that would make Stephen King squirm. In her ninth work of fiction, Cris Mazza walks the fence between man and nature, instinct and compusion, all the while throwing rocks into the yawning gulch between the sexes. As a portrait of our species, Girl Beside Him is a powerful book.

Red Hen Press, Los Angeles : ©2004.

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.

Coffee House Press, Minneapolis : 1992.

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

City Lights, San Francisco : ©2003.

Cris Mazza delivers a spirited rebuttal to pop-culture stereotypes about growing up female in Southern California. Coming of age in the 1970s and '80s, Mazza's memories aren't about surfing, cheerleading or riding in convertibles. Though her story has its exotic elements—her family hunts and gathers food in the semi-arid coastal hills well into the early '70s—she sets herself in the context of familiar Americana. Repeating motifs—gender issues, the California landscape, dogs, musicians, plus the perplexing melancholy of a sexless marriage—thread through these very personal essays, as Mazza confronts madness, disability, sexual dysfunction and death, speaking to the drama of ordinary lives.

Fiction Collective Two, Normal, IL : 1998.

These stories convey a powerful, convincing sense of the bewilderment and excitement of sexual desires. Mazza describes a world that resembles a shopping mall gone mad, populated by ordinary, normal people behaving in ways that mock the very concept of normality. By describing these lives with an acute sense of the absurd, Mazza produces a dark, sometimes hilarious comedy that undercuts the shaky compromise of the consensus we call reality.

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing 2023

As she tracks her coming-of-age and struggle to reconcile with her body, Mazza scrutinizes evolving attitudes toward race, sex, and self, turning her family’s history into a richly illuminating slice of American life and consciousness. Donna Seaman, Booklist Cris Mazza is both a national and deeply personal archivist of an America in crisis. Her work epitomizes the complex intersections between the personal and political, excavating grief, gender, objects, family, and history with a cool yet almost eerily intimate lens.” Gina Frangello Author of Blow Your House Down: A Story Of Family, Feminism, And Treason Cris Mazza’s non-fiction, with its probing, searching, comprehensive need for the actual, regardless of difficulties that might be found there, is as important as her fiction, which is important indeed. When I think of the condition of the memoir today, longing for a time when it was more committed to the unvarnished human truths, this is a writer I think of with great admiration and respect. Rick Moody Author of The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions and The Long Accomplishment: A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony 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. Lidia Yuknavitch Author of Thrust and Chronology of Water

Chiasmus Press, Portland : 2005.

Fiction. In the 80's a young woman advertises her services as a model to photographers; she discovers their weaknesses, seduces them, then extorts them by claiming to be under-age. In the 90's a 40-something man is married to a doctor who only views him as a sex object. In these two reversals of sexual harassment and gender-inferiority, Mazza explores such issues asthe lnaguage of bodies, sexual desirability, latent adolescence, plus whatever the genders share...and what they can never share.

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.

SOMETHING WRONG WITH HER is an astonishing real-time testimony of a couple’s reconnection while — and within — the writing of this memoir, and their candid wrestling with 30-year-old memories, questions and regrets.

University of Georgia Press 2024

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.

Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, CA : 2009.

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.

Emergency Press, New York : ©2011.

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 Southern California 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.

Soft Skull Press ; Brooklyn, NY : 2007.

"A gripping tale of compulsion, obsession, and forgiveness, set so evocatively amidst the fogs and furies of the offseason Maine coast. It's also an intriguing exploration of the ways in which our ancestral pasts echo within our own psyches." --Lisa Alther, author of Kinflicks and Kinfolks As children, Tam and her older brother were swimming when she suffered her first epileptic seizure. He pulled her from the water and was crowned a hero. Tam was labeled “disabled” and never swam again. And so began 30 years of vigilance, never allowing her body to betray her, never allowing her brother or her family or anyone else to influence her path. Now, in middle age, a lifetime’s worth of control has taken its toll. Exhausted, she heads to Maine where, while working on a genealogy project, she falls under the spell of two dead women: an ancestor, Mary Catherine, who died at 33; the other, the town ghost. Through their cloistered, tragic lives Tam relives her own life over and over--until a distant cousin forces her to see herself in a new light. This novel of one woman's quest to transcend self-imposed limitations is superbly crafted and richly satisfying, and "shows us how, through resuscitating our pasts, and rescuing each other, we might just save ourselves" (Alex Shakar, author of Savage Girl).

BlazeVOX 2020

Decades before #metoo, Cal chose his punishment for going too far with a girl he was crazy about: a life-sentence with a woman he could not love, whose frequent rages, untapped spending and ruthless children were his means to distract himself from longing and regret. The girl from his past also condemned him to periodic postcards bearing no return address. Rather than increasing his despair, the postcards helped stoke the imaginary life he maintained with her, including dialogue about his plight, images of her showing up while he plays his sax in a nightclub, and even sex, the very realm that had initiated her retreat from him.

Coffee House Press ; Minneapolis : ©1995.

An affair with a married man enables a woman to finally come to terms with a rape she underwent 10 years earlier. Until then, Erin Haley had been unable to remember the incident, involving a colleague in a radio station where she worked as a journalist.