Cris Mazza, author of eight books of fiction, explores the shadowy, often brutal, always disconcerting psychological zone where we humans teeter on the verge of becoming something other than strictly human, whether it's in the short story from her previous collection, Former Virgin (FC2, 1997), where a woman in the midst of surgery falls into a fugue about, not her husband fondling her body, but her doctor fondling her internal organs, or in Dog People (Coffee House, 1997), her last novel, which limns six characters' vaguely dissatisfied lives in suburban San Diego as they connect through the dogs one of them is attempting to breed into a super-species. In the latter, the protagonists' actions continually parallel those of their canines, which go in and out of season, are artificially inseminated, whelped, groomed, and shown, all the while competing with each other, striving to establish a natural hierarchy based on strength, poise, primping, and a simple innate hunger to attack and survive. Here, in her deeply unsettling new novel, she continues to investigate the boundary between human and animal, but this time the comparison is drawn between people and cats. A forty-three-year-old wildlife biologist, Brian Leonard (note the feline embedded in his last name), flies to Wyoming to conduct a study of relocated cougars. Soon after he hires an assistant, Leya, a sensitive woman prone to victimization following an ugly divorce, things turn as turbulent as his flight into Cheyenne. Brian begins to abuse Leya emotionally, threatens to do so physically, and uses her to probe his haunted past. The bedrock of his impassive, sexually inhibited character, it turns out, is founded on his unhinged relationship with his lesbian sister, Diane, who one night long ago committed suicide in the next room at their home while Brian, a teen at the time, masturbated to the gunfire. Overlaid atop this plot is another involving a plan by one of the local ranchers to have a rogue cougar kill one of his horses for insurance money, then blackmail Brian to kill the cougar in turn. Both plots converge in a shocking crescendo that italicizes the nexus between violence and sexuality in the world according to Mazza, and culminates with a final sentence that reminds us that, like cats, we are all at the end of the day either the predators or the hunted-and more often than not some bedeviled complex of both. On the way to that revelation, Mazza's tightly crafted novel creates a resonant sense of the severe non-urban west, takes a number of engaging narrative chances (including several post-mortem dialogues between Brian and his long-dead sister), and reminds us again and again why anyone interested in first-rate alternative fiction should be familiar with Mazza's admirably and unnervingly transgressive work.

If dialogue is what characters 'do' to each other, then they're really 'doing it' in Girl Beside Him. They do it with suspense, with fear, with humor and with chilling intensity. The psychological depth of the protagonists--and their awareness of their own emotional occultation--is alone worth the read, but the save-the-cougars plot line really keeps the pages turning. That and the weird group of dudes back at the bar. From a sociological perspective, the content is fascinating; from a literary perspective, the formal structure is impressive. The documents-within-documents technique provides a lighter rhythmic counterpoint to the actual or potential emotional violence of the dialogue. It makes you want to read everything else this woman's written.

Cris Mazza has once again proven herself to be a master of the psychological novel. Brian, a man with a troubled past, enters the Wyoming wilderness ostensibly to track cougars for a wildlife study. He hires a young divorced woman, Leya, who unwittingly becomes a part of Brian's own dangerous experiment: to test his sexual deviancy. Brian believes he might be a sexual predator, and, as he trains his rifle sight on idealistic Leya, he discovers the pith of who he really is.

But this novel is not only about plot. Mazza's language evokes a savage landscape where predators of all types lurk. She takes us into Brian's psyche through creatively constructed flashbacks and into Leya's edited version of reality (which is often hilarious) through letters she sends home to her best friend. Although Mazza is often named among an elite list of experimental writers, her testing of fictional boundaries is never obtuse. GIRL BESIDE HIM is as accessible as any strong selling literary novel.

If you've never read Mazza, start here. You'll wonder why you haven't picked up one of her books before this.

This book was highly enjoyable. The short, episodic and almost pulsating chapters were memorable. I had a hard time putting the book down and was almost disappointed once I had finished it. Phelan's sexual encounters may possibly mirror anyone's awkward first times or getting caught in the act. However, the title of the book is a bit perplexing. How does one leave a country anyway?

This is the third Cris Mazze book I've read, and it just may be my favorite. Her ability to create real and interesting characters woven into a plot smudged around the edge like charcoal was evident in the novel, and made it fascinating. I found the story romantic, and intriguing in it's plot structure of short-vingettes almost, all connecting to reveal her characters.

This story of an unraveling photographer as she joins a mysterious community theater troupe drew me in with its graceful intensity. Although Connie wants desperately to leave her camera (and hence her past) locked in its vault, she is a photographer to the core. Her efforts to substitute that art for other arts - first playing the cello and later acting - only get her into trouble as she finds herself privy to the secrets of the troupe. When she finally twists her camera lens back in place, she finds herself caught in a murkiness that only her camera can see, although never clearly enough. This literary descent into near madness and pill-confused reality while still keeping sight of the real world is a balancing act well achieved.

INDIGENOUS is a rare book: a memoir that offers both intimacy and a sharp-eyed look at a variety of social issues. Cris Mazza grew up in southern California outside of San Diego as one of five children, but, as she makes clear from the first page, she is not a stereotypical Californian. She is not blonde, does not surf, has no interest in acting. Her California is a gritty terrain - scrubby land populated by ant lions, bird dogs, and sand crabs. The daughter of educators by vocation and scavengers by avocation, she grew up hunting, clamming at the beach, searching through the landfill for soda bottles to redeem for spending money, and playing with and studying the indigenous creatures she encountered. Her views on ecology come from knowing both the before and the after, and by attempting to understand the forces that come into play. But Mazza is not an environmentalist; she is a fiction writer who has set out to share the complexity of her experiences. In these personal essays, Mazza uses her life as a touchstone to pose questions we should all be asking. In the chapter on her failed marriage to a San Diego symphony musician, she explores the reasons behind - as well as the repercussions of - America's view on the arts. As she discusses both her mother's stroke and her own volunteer work in the children's wing of a nursing home, she poignantly evokes the difficult role of being a caregiver while exploring what it means when the body cannot perform the most basic of human activities - walking and talking. She conjures up her preteen days of wanting to be a boy in the 1970's when the male gender seemed to have all the fun and advantages. She writes of raising her Shetland sheepdogs to be champion show dogs, thus examining the intricate relationship between humans and animals. All the essays are punctuated by black-and-white photographs of Mazza and her family. These images serve as anchors to Mazza's writing; they add to the atmosphere and wonder of what is written within these pages.

Mazza writes with clear-eyed passion for her subject matter. Under her touch, ordinary subject matter becomes extraordinary. Her story contains none of the sensationalist topics of many high-profile memoirs; instead, it revels in the quiet details of an unconventional life. This book is exactly what a memoir should be: intimate, intelligent, and thought-provoking. Certainly fans of Mazza's fiction should read INDIGENOUS to understand the background from which her stories and novels spring. However, even those without a familiarity of her work will enjoy Mazza's stories about growing up in rural California and then taking that experience into a much larger world.

If I had to pick one phrase to describe the collection of short fiction stories in Cris Mazza's Former Virgin, it would have to be cutting edge. Some of the descriptions and dialogue were a tad shocking at first, but I loved it. It reminded me of "Sex in the City," only it was written before HBO aired the hit series. Former Virgin has an array of stories, some told in first person point of view, others in third person point of view. The vivid descriptions and details immediately capture the reader. I felt as if I was there watching the story take place. What I really liked most about her stories were the characters. In almost every story I read I could relate, either personally or through someone I know, to how the character felt or what he or she was going through. They were realistic and raw. Mazza manages to capture human behavior and experience in unique and new ways. She's not afraid to write what we all say and do behind closed doors. My only pet peeve was that some of the stories ended too abruptly or without a real ending. Kudos to Cris. ...

Cris Mazza's short story collection is filled with real life occurances, but not everyday occurances. She writes with excellant quaility about the sort of things women hide and gossip about to only their close friends, about things people love and hate at the same time. I was captivated by Mazza's talent, her ability to so accurately express things that sometime go through everyones mind, crazy and yet unnoticed thoughts. I saw Mazza read at the college I attend and her attitude was great. She is friendly, smart and very confident in her talents.

Former Virgin, written in 1997 is a collection of short stories written by Cris Mazza. These stories all take very interesting points of view, and are not typical by any means. My favorites of this collection are the stories that have a crazy twist at the end, and before that, the story builds and builds, you think its going one place, but then the plots goes another way. Hesitation begins with describing the characters, this guy and his punk rock girlfriend, and building up the relationship that they’re having. As the story went on, I realized that this guy was still married, and the wife walks in on her husband and the punk rock girl video-taping a sex fantasy. (spoiler)
Let’s Play doctor is similar to Hesitation in that the story starts one way and ends up somewhere you never thought it would. Dee, the main character, has an operation done to remove a cyst. Then she falls asleep and has this horrifying dream about the doctor, and the bookstore, and the smell of baked things, all things she was talking to the nurse about right before she passed out during the operation. The descriptions in the dream are vivid and surreal(very much like an actual dream), especially the way Mazza describes the doctor reaching up inside her and feeling her insides, along with her smelling the bread. It’s really amazing, but terrifying at the same time. Then in the end she wakes up, and just starts crying. I was surprised and entertained by the second half of the story.
To be honest, I haven’t read very much fiction like this. Compared to the books that I normally read this was way out there. It’s obviously important to read all different kinds of fiction to really grasp what’s out there, and know what you like. So many people are just stuck on one genre, like science fiction or mystery and romance. I enjoyed Former Virgin, because it opened my eyes to other types of stories, and now I know that I can like anything as long as its written well.

[...] I cannot put into words how pompous and poorly written this is. I cannot believe this abomination could be published, and that this "writer" is actually a professor at UIC. God help us all...

Part soap opera, part social commentary, this book as engrossing as any Aaron Spelling creation, but also engages the brain. Since when are midlist novels page-turners? Since now. This is indulgence without the guilt. This is a gripping plot without any lawyers or murderers -- just six characters treating each other like dogs, treating their dogs like people, mating, dating, relating. The most amazing scene -- when a woman and her husband -- was she forcing herself on him? I'm not sure. It was intense. Dancers and great danes. Lesbians and Labrador retrievers. Put a collar on it and take it home.

This complex and brutal novel is among Mazza's best work. With a point of view that moves seamlessly from character to character and visceral, gripping language, "Dog People" offers readers a provocative and compelling window into the human condition. These emotionally stunted characters make paltry offerings of friendship and love and, vis a vis their failure to connect with one another, the very nature of human relationships is subtly interrogated. Human-human bonds of friendship and love are deconstructed, Mazza seems to suggest, by humanity's own failure to live up to the constructs it designs. Love and friendship and marriage do not and can not exist as we might want them to, and our bonds with one another are elusive at best and brutally damaging at worst. In relationships with animals, however, even the most flawed human heart can function with purity. This book stings and shimmers, touches and wounds. It invokes the inevitabilities of both isolation and our desperate, inefficacious struggles against it.

Fans of Mazza's gritty, heart-stopping prose in "Your Name Here" and "Is It Sexual Harrassment Yet?" will revel in "Dog People."

From "acclaimed" UIC professor, Cris Mazza comes this literary cesspool. Like biting into a juicy apple pie and finding a severed thumb in it. P-U it stinks!!!

0 stars would be more like it.

Animal Acts is a concoction of stories dealing with the intimate human relationship. Mazza shows stark contrasts and comparisons of men, women and animals within the individual stories. "Dead Dog" shows Lea, a self-respecting gym teacher, whose main relationship with Laddy, her aging dog who dies, reflects the differences in their clashing worlds and her acute dependency on him. "Animals Don't Think About It" is a story of Tara Katz, a painter whose vague memory starts to take a toll on her relationship with a chess-fanatic sculptor boyfriend. The title story, a story of a woman trying to attract an unwilling man, demonstrates the narrator's involvement with the story in play format. "Erasable Ink" shows a poignant loneliness existing in the character of Robert which manifests itself through his drawings, imagination and his inspection of Michael, his coworker who gets the girls. The plots seem, on the surface, absurd but the author manages to paint a convincing portrait about the characters and why these people do what they do in these relationships.The complexities are expressed plainly, even subtly, through detail and dialogue. It is only after reading the stories that everything somewhat falls together and not necessarily in a mystery novel-kind-of-way. The reader gains perspective on these unique but in a way, familiar relationships. The flow of Mazza's words and how she manages to exhibit emotions through actions and not thoughts is a must-study for beginning fiction writers. The aura of this book conveys the meaningful emotions dealt by men and especially which makes it timeless.

Mazza's "Animal Acts" pursues a singular vision of confused, sometimes mad, sexual desire while exploring the warped trope of artistic expression. Many of Mazza's characters are artists and musicians, characterized in-story by bursts of abstruse dialogue and terse exposition. Particularly disgusting and affecting is the opening scene of "From Hunger", where a woman eats paint. "She put the next two fistfuls [of paint] into her mouth, trying to swallow them... She retched and blue dribbled down her chin." While a scene of such intrinsic ridiculousness might easier been penned self-indulgently, Mazza manages to give us such fragmentary, hallucinatory snippets of the character that the story takes us almost to the delusional depths of the character herself.

Several pieces utilize jarring changes in tense and inspired variations on the traditional short-story form to create their unique textures, the most striking of this kind being the title story, which is something like a play and something like a script but neither. Intermittently these flourishes and sometimes skeletal ambiguities seem vacuous, or there merely as flourishes, but the mood conjured is always lively and filled with the sound of surprise. The structure of each piece is tightly woven, but superficially sometimes having such disparate elements, that the reader is forced into complicity and interpretation. The broad ideas of "art", "music", and animal behaviors presented throughout are like metaphorical springboards, allowing for broad and rewarding readings of the various stories.

Cris Mazza skillfully blends her stories with elements of black humor and heart breaking humility. In "Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?" Mazza demonstrates why she is one of America's best female voices in fiction. From "In six short lessons." Where she tells the story of a battered spouse, and how this relates to her as a dog trainer. The story lines cris-cross between humor and sadness, sometimes within the same sentence. Cris breathes life into all her characters, and you can't help but to feel for them. Cris Mazza as a story teller is strangely unique. Her experiments of with point-of-view and layout are simply stunning at times. In the title story, Mazza tells the tale of a rape through the view point of two seemingly un-reliable narrators. Leaving it to the reader to decide who is telling the truth and who is lying. Through out this collection of short fiction Mazza explores the often hidden elements of relationships. We slowly get the sense of who Mazza is as a female writer, and a sense of ourselves in all her characters. Her views, at time feminist, but often even more so, they represent real women. Over all this book is a nice start to further reading.

I loved this book! Mazza uses point of view to create sympathies with characters who are the cause of the conflict. This book looks beyond the political ramifications of sexual harrassment and explores some of the unlikely human reactions to the disfunctional relationships we all end up in at some point.

I was compelled to write this review on the desire to offset the completely unthinkable nonsense first review. Mazza is simply one of the best writers out there; her novels and collections are relentless in their ambition and success. Buy this book, you will not regret it, and check out Former Virgin and the new novel Girl Beside Him, also.