Will Zink Bio

Will Zink is the author of numerous books for older folks, none of which are this funny. Wild Grapes is his first tale for the slightly younger crowd.



Laurels for William Zink’s Previous Works

Pieta

“Pieta is a true and generous wonder of a novel. In sharp, beautifully written prose, William Zink takes on big themes – love and devotion and family and death – and makes us all the better for it.”
—Donald Ray Pollock


“We are in a time not unlike the 30s, when the need for job now rises high above the faraway dream of getting the right credentials from the right places. And so with literature, where a tide will be coming from the heartland, the boonies, and inner cities of brown, black, and white America. Its authors will be without proper literary pedigrees, they will have attended but done poorly in boring high schools, maybe gone to community college for a while, did or did not graduate from a four-year Institution of higher learning. Definitely not with laurels bestowed upon them by top-tier universities, not fairy-dusted by a so-admired writing program, they will write about the common and the poor among us, those working more than they want, or much less than they need. William Zink is not the first, but he is certainly among the most ambitious of them in this coming wave.”
—Dagoberto Gilb



Ohio River Dialogues

“Zink's characters are self-contradictory, arbitrary, generous, prejudiced, sensitive, self-pitying—complicated, in other words. You end up liking them in spite of it, or more probably because of it.”
—The Pittsburgh City Paper


“Blood, water, and the high lonesome sound of late night guitars; Ohio River Dialogues is a twisted, bumpy ride that shouldn’t be missed.”
—Michael Stanley, front man for The Michael Stanley Band


“William Zink’s Ohio River Dialogues is...Not quite a novel. Not exactly a play. Not a stream of seemingly disconnected stories that somehow magically intertwine perfectly at the end. Instead, he presents us with a hybrid of these, and what emerges is revolutionary. Indeed, Zink might soon be credited with creating a new form of literature.”
—The Main Street Rag



Ballad of the Confessor

“This is a muscular and gripping tale from inside the world of work. ‘The Confessor’ brings home the real shape of a reality nearly erased by television and statistics. Is this the start of that much-needed social realist fiction? Perhaps. Zink is one hell of a writer.”
—Andrei Codrescu


“A genuine Southern Masterpiece.”
—The Charleston City Paper


“Read this book with cicadas and beer, because that’s how I suspect it was written. It is tight and beautiful and glazed with the good kind of sweat.”
—David Giffels, author of All the Way Home


“To anyone who says Southern Literature has disappeared from the New South of air conditioning and interstates, I say read this book. The characters in William Zink’s amazing novel don’t go inside when the heat hits 100 degrees—they just keep working and dreaming as they dig the flowerbeds and cut the grass of all the intellectuals who moan about great Southern Novels being a thing of the past.”
—Jason Sanford, storySouth


“Ballad of the Confessor is a world of work tale that grips the reader in the arms of the New South and doesn’t let go until the final page. In passages terse and stark, in others strident and moving, this novel takes the reader on a roller coaster ride of emotions.”
—Curled Up With a Good Book



The Hole

“This first work is a surprising and unlikely treasure from an author using a surprising and unlikely pseudonym...Highly recommended.”
—Eric Robbins, Booklist


“The Hole is a wonderful, enthusiastically recommended novel of memorable characters, lyrical prose, and a literate, sophisticated approach to examining human conditions that are paradoxically unique and universal.”
—John Taylor, Midwest Book Review


“The Hole is a strange and magical love story that is a joy to read.”
—Larry Lawrence, Abilene Reporter-News