Todd Zuniga is the founding editor of Opium Magazine and a co-founder of the Literary Death Match reading series. His fiction has appeared most recently in Canteen. He’s now at work on the tentatively titled Passport, a non-fiction collection about memory and home that covers 20 countries.
I feel ridiculous even listing it because of its popularity (and my tardiness to the party), but The Road by Cormac McCarthy is the book I read this year that most reminded me of two things: why I love to I write, and why I love books. It worked deep into me, so much that I ended a date prematurely with a beautiful, funny, charming woman just so I could take the longest possible subway ride home to burn through more of it. I love how it challenged my eternal optimism, how I kept wanting and wanting and wanting for things to be okay. Then there was a moment when I was as worn out as The Man and The Boy, and I threw my hands up, and said, “Fine! You win! It’s not going to be okay! There is no redemption!” And then, after starving us of it for so many pages, there’s humanity and there’s hope.
