What Happened Here

& 34;Bonnie ZoBell& 39;s linked novella and story collection, What Happened Here, made me feel as if I& 39;d lived all my life in San Diego& 39;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 Kieslowski& 39;s Red or Haruki Murakami& 39;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.& 34; -Jerry Gabriel, author of Drowned Boy, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction