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McMurtrie is senior editor of the San Francisco-based literary journal Zyzzyva.

He recently wrote a profile of the average Native American teen for Esquire magazine and has had short stories published in McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, and Zyzzyva — three literary magazines based in the Bay Area.

We considered dusting off the dictionary and going from A1 to Zyzzyva, however, there are an estimated 171,146 words currently in use in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, not to mention 47,156 obsolete words.

You don't need to know all of the words in a language: for example it seems unlikely that anyone reading this has suffered from not knowing that "Zyzzyva" is a kind of tropical weevil and not a Spice Girls lyric.

He’s a staff writer at the Millions and contributing editor at Zyzzyva.