Zack Wentz

Books by Zack Wentz

The Garbageman and the Prostitute

by Zack Wentz

Chiasmus Press, 2006-01.

Northwest Edge III: The End of Reality

by Andy Mingo

Chiasmus Press, 2006.

Not Quite What I Was Planning, Revise...

by Larry Smith, Rachel Fershleiser

Harper, 2008.

About Me

My name is Zack Wentz. I currently live in San Diego, California, but was born, raised, and nearly killed in/by Oregon.

My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nerve, Fiction International, Black Clock, Golden Handcuffs Review, Opium, In Posse, Pindeldyboz, Mad Hatter’s Review, Swink, Word Riot, elimae, and elsewhere. My novel The Garbageman and the Prostitute was published by Chiasmus Press (and is, apparently, out of print, and going for an idiomatic arm and a leg). I'm currently shopping a novel, getting into a new one, and completing a collection of short fiction.

In addition to that, I'm working on a comic book with one friend, and helping another with a pilot for a sci-fi children’s program (no kidding). I am also a founding member of the ongoing musical projects Kill Me Tomorrow and the Dabbers.

And I also have a few jobs. Have to have.

Why do you write?

I've long suspected that it might be some kind of illness.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Oh God . . . Sturgeon, Nabokov, Beckett, Cervantes, Bioy-Casares, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Kafka, Chandler, Thomas (Dylan), Wells, Celine, Grass, Proust, Dostoevsky, Bernhard, O' Brien, Bierce, Crane, Cela, Rabelais, O' Neill, Robbe-Grillet, Melville, Jeffers, Dickens, Abe, Smith (Cordwainer), Twain, Pound, O'Connor, Elkin, Brown (Fredric), Petronius, McCarthy, Fante, Hemmingway (mixed), Vonnegut, Waugh, Hamsun, Olson, Disch, Alfau, Tevis, Mathews, Vance, Huysmans, Marquez, Hammett, Borges, Malzberg, Stevens (Wallace), Bowles (Paul), Barthelme (Donald), Joyce, Jackson (Shirley), Tanizaki, Paley, Leiber, Gogol, Lem, Lafferty, Coover, Berrigan, Tolstoy, Welty, Tate, Yourgrau (adult stuff), Dick (PK), Apuleius, Thompson (Jim), Fowles, Bayley, Kawabata, Gorki, Pinter, Kosinski (whoever wrote him; still more interesting than some more recent literary frauds come to light), Bester, Dahl (adult stuff), Edson, Wolfe (Gene), Smith (Stevie), Silverberg, Brautigan, Antunes, Berryman, Merritt, Finney (Charles L.), Bradbury, Calvino, Collier (John), Woolrich, Barth, Strindberg, Burgess, Delillo, Ellroy, Millhauser, Saki, Cendrars, Mishima, Pohl, Tiptree Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon), Ballard, Spark, Tutuola, Pynchon, Kornbluth, Walser, Priest, Stein, van Vogt, Coney, Gombrowicz . . . there's really almost no end to this (I may well be more book than man, at this point). Relatively newer folks: Erickson, Vollmann, Wallace, Wright, Ohle, Dixon, Cooper, Johnson, Lish, Moody, Lutz, Powell (Padget), Marcus, Aylett, Williams (Diane), Evenson, Mathews, Derby, Lipsyte . . .

THE HEARING TRUMPET by Leonara Carrington is probably about as good as it gets, really, but if I somehow had the power to force everybody to read at least one novel, it would probably be Miller's A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (for many reasons).