After being a long term penpal of Avner Shats, she came to prominence in her fifties with the help of Jonathan Franzen and her novel, Mislaid, was longlisted for the National Book Award.

Her debut The Wallcreeper was released in the United States by the independent press Dorothy and named one of 100 notable books of 2014 by The New York Times, as was Mislaid.

After fifteen years spent writing fiction exclusively for a single penpal, the Israeli postmodernist Avner Shats, Zink caught the attention of Jonathan Franzen with a letter promoting the work of the German ornithologist Martin Schneider-Jacoby and asking for his help to save birds in the Balkans.

"[6] and that, "The passages about European environmental groups, government programs and methods of protest are less universal and more like amusement for insiders -- more like the impromptu they started as, in other words."

[11] Walter Kirn, in The New York Times Book Review, found it a "provocative masquerade with heart," identifying an "elegance and confidence that are exceptionally rare now.

"[12] New York Times Magazine writer Daniel J. Sharfstein has observed that while Zink's plot may be "over-the-top," the real-life case of former NAACP chapter president Rachel Dolezal bears a remarkable parallel.

"[16] In a book review about Mislaid by Walter Kirn, he admits that toward the end of the novel, "Piquancy and intimacy are lost, sacrificed to momentum and high mayhem.

[4][3] "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.