The new voice of the alien native

I'm sitting in the bookshop and laughing out loud. Before they decide to throw me out, I quickly buy the book. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, a debut collection of short stories by Z Z Packer, is the best thing I've read in years. Here is the first paragraph of the first story in this collection, and you'll see why I was hooked:

"By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatised with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled."

Delectable. I couldn't put it down from then on.

How great it feels to be reading someone who, you know for sure, is going to be one of the major new voices of our times. The title story of this collection was included in The New Yorker's Debut Fiction issue in 2000, and 'Brownies', the opening story, also appeared in that Mecca of short story writing.

Before these good events happened, Packer's name was Zuwena, which means "good" in Swahili, but she has been called Z Z for as long as she can remember, and so she uses it as her name. Born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta and Louisville, she went to Yale, Johns Hopkins and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University where they sat around and read stories every week.

In between, she travelled, did some odd jobs including teaching high school, and, importantly, wrote. She now lives in San Francisco, where she is writing a novel about the African-American West.

Evidently, there are autobiographical elements in the eight stories in this collection. She has spoken in an interview with Book magazine about constantly having had a feeling of not belonging, of writing about her own experience, "even if it hasn't happened to me".

She has spoken about her admiration for Toni Morrison, for The Bluest Eye and Beloved. From writing about the racially split Brownie Camp, to the Million Man March in Washington, to the isolation of a black honour student at Yale, to the reluctant high school teacher in Baltimore, to the group of foreign tourists bumming it out in Japan, Z Z Packer's imagination has been everywhere and done everything.

Her stories weave these elements into fiction that is at once hard-edged and soft, cynical and tender, bleak and yet holding out some frail hope. But she is not merely a black American woman writer writing for black women in America. She is writing about race and identity in ways that touch all of us and make us think.

She is writing about an American girl drifting in Japan, a black student finding herself in orientation games at Yale, a white girl discovering her sexual orientation at college, a teacher struggling to teach, and young black girls growing up somehow in this crazy world.

In Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Dina sits with other freshmen watching them play orientation games. One game has each person choosing what inanimate object they would like to be.

Dina chooses to be a revolver "" and her life changes. From being an honour student, she is now put on watch, with therapy sessions and counsellor visits. Dina withdraws into a prickly aloofness that opens up only to another loner like herself, this time a white girl student, and they embark on an unnamed, unacknowledged affair.

Packer is writing not only about race and injustice but about the sadness of growing up and finding out what her young narrator realises in 'Brownies': "There was something mean in the world that I could not stop".

Packer's writing tone is remarkably self-assured: it is at once laugh-out-loud funny, angry, sad, bleak, bitter, and full of feeling. It is insightful, intelligent and, above all, original. Packer is an old-fashioned storyteller in the sense that her characters are fully realised, with moods and moments and hard edges. And she enjoys telling their stories.

I had already read the two fabulous stories, 'Brownies' and 'Drinking Coffee Elsewhere', that had appeared in The New Yorker; I had read them again and again, and I was looking around for more. When I finally got my hands on this collection and read it through "" at one sitting, and believe me it's intense "" I was as exhilarated as I was exhausted. Z Z Packer is one of the most exciting new voices of our time.

DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE

ZZ Packer

Riverhead Books

Pages: 238

Price: $ 24.95