Nell Zink

Personal life Zink was born in California in 1964 and raised in rural Virginia, a setting she draws on in Mislaid.

In 1993, while living in Hoboken, New Jersey, Zink founded a zine called Animal Review, which ran until 1997 and "featured submissions and interviews with punk musicians about their pets, from King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp writing about his rabbit Beaton Bunnerius Bun, to Jon Langford, of British punk band The Mekons, discussing his loach fish." Zink has worked as a secretary at Colgate-Palmolive and as a technical writer in Tel Aviv. She has worked in construction, waited tables, and as a secretary before working as a translator. "There's never a market for true art," Zink told an interviewer from The Paris Review, "so my main concern was always to have a job that didn't require me to write or think." She lives in Bad Belzig. On May 8, 1990, she eloped with Benjamin A. Burck in a "very simple civil ceremony" at the Henrico County Courthouse in Richmond, Virginia; they divorced in 1996. That year she married the Israeli composer and poet Zohar Eitan. Nicotine (304 pages, Ecco Press, 2016, ) Private Novelist (336 pages, Ecco Press, 2016, ) Doxology (416 pages, Ecco Press, 2019, ) Avalon (224 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, 2022, ) Sister Europe (195 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, 2025, )

Short fiction

Zink, Nell (2017). "Bonebreaker". Harper's, June 2017. Zink, Nell (2019). "Marmalade Sky". Harper's, July 2019.

Essays

Zink, Nell (2019). "The Bird Angle". Harper's, November 2019. Zink, Nell (2020). "This Babushka Has Talons". n+1, January 2020.

Liner notes Two Originals of Tom Liwa, 2002

Critical studies and reviews

Schwartz, Madeleine (September 2019). "Nell Zink's Satire Raises the Stakes". The New Yorker. September 2, 2019 Issue.