Praise for What Happened Here

"In clear, lucid prose, What Happened Here evokes a haunting sense of place—calling up a California you don't often read about, with Californians you don't often meet." 

—Lionel Shriver, author of Big Brother: A Novel and We Need to Talk About Kevin, winner of the Orange Prize

“Bonnie ZoBell’s linked novella and story collection, What Happened Here, made me feel as if I’d lived all my life in San Diego’s North Park, whose inhabitants live and work in the long shadow of the 1978 airline crash that decimated the neighborhood. What is most extraordinary is the ease with which ZoBell at once accumulates the layers of a novelistic narrative and offers us beautifully written, compact stories with lives of their own. Like Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Red or Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake, ZoBell allows us a complete picture only through a nimble narrative triangulation between the many characters and stories. The hard-fought and bounded truth we see here is, I think, the truest kind of truth.” 

—Jerry Gabriel, author of Drowned Boy, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction

“Bonnie ZoBell’s luminously intersecting stories of artists, musicians, teachers and assorted shimmering misfits in a North Park neighborhood that happens to be the site of a historic plane wreck, beautifully chronicles the struggles of the living to survive—emotionally and physically—in the shadow of wreckage and ghosts. Her characters’ connections, madnesses, kindnesses and demons are startlingly poignant and resonant.” 

—Gina Frangello, author of A Life in Men: A Novel

“What Happened Here is a wise, lively celebration of the temptations we endure and the small victories we achieve, both individually and communally, under the shadow of transcendent events. The characters and prose are fiercely alive. Their rage and spiky humor, their tenderness and forgiveness, weave through these fine stories like movements in a symphony.” 

—Robert Cohen, author of Amateur Barbarians and Inspired Sleep

“Readers may argue over whether the greatest strength of Bonnie ZoBell’s What Happened Here is the prize-winning prose or the full sympathy with which ZoBell gives life to her delightfully varied cast of characters (sour, sweet, canny, sexy, you name it; all of them linked by a gruesome tragedy). Cherry-pick later; first time through, read the whole big-hearted collection from beginning to end to savor how perfectly the romance of the last story informs the vision of the whole.” 

—Elizabeth Evans, author of Carter Clay: A Novel

“I love the moment in each of these geode-like stories when the surface cracks open and what lies beneath—the clear quartz of kindness, the dolomite of tragedy, the chalcedony surprise of unlikely love—at last comes into the light.”  

—Roy Kesey, author of Pacazo and Any Deadly Thing

About the Author

Bonnie ZoBell lives in a casita in San Diego with her husband, dogs, cats, and many succulents. She is the author of The Whack-Job Girls (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2013), and is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, the Capricorn Novel Award, a spot on The Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions, and a notable story included in the storySouth Million Writers Award. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such magazines as The Potomac Review, Connotation Press, The Los Angeles Review, PANK, and The Greensboro Review. She has been a fellow at Yaddo, MacDowell, VCCA, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, The Wurlitzer Foundation, and Villa Montalvo. ZoBell received an MFA from Columbia University and currently she teaches at San Diego Mesa College. She is an Associate Editor at The Northville Review and at Flash Fiction Chronicle, and is working on a novel. 

Her website is www.bonniezobell.com