Serve spaghetti and meatballs to an Italian, and they may question why pasta and meat are being served together. Order a samosa as an appetizer, and an Indian friend might point out, as writer Sejal Sukhadwala has, that this is similar to a British restaurant offering sandwiches as a first course. Offer an American a hamburger patty coated in thick demi-glace, and they’ll likely raise an eyebrow at this common Japanese staple dubbed hambagoo.
Each of these meals or dishes feels somehow odd or out of place, at least to one party, as though an unspoken rule has been broken. Except these rules have indeed been discussed, written about extensively, and given a name: food grammar.
“Hi Sandra, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but the company has decided to close the newspaper due to COVID so, unfortunately, you’ve been terminated.”
“It sucked the air out of the room” is an expression I’d heard many times, but didn’t fully grasp until my publisher delivered that message during a phone call late last August. The call about the closure of my beloved community paper came two weeks before my 62nd birthday. Even as I processed what it meant to lose the job I’d loved for 20 years, and to lose a newspaper that had been around for 112, the realist in me knew immediately this layoff would reverberate. Because of my age and ever-diminishing number of print and digital news publications, I knew this likely meant the end of my journalism career.
The challenge often with fiction that tries to do this much is that it's easy for the reader to pick up what feels inorganic, or less lived-in and fully observed. Chen, however, seems to have no problem at all bridging the divides of class, gender, and ideology. What else can explain this unlikely page-turner of a book, except her already envious career as an embedded journalist, reporting on everything from the Chinese criminal justice system to tech companies.
In a series of rich and varied portraits, mostly of life in China but including forays to Atlantic City, N.J., and Arizona, she unleashes a powerful and enticing new voice, at times as strange as the dark fairy tale master Carmen Maria Machado, at others as inventive as the absurdist king George Saunders — but always layered with the texture available to a foreign correspondent who has seen it all.
There comes a moment in every Easy Rawlins mystery I’ve read, where I realize I have no idea what’s going on. The plot picks up speed, becoming a hectic Tilt-a-Whirl ride where dead bodies, cold-stone killers, femmes fatales, crooked cops and lost spaces in Los Angeles whiz by at top velocity. It’s at this moment — when I’m most exasperated with Walter Mosley as a writer — that I’m also most admiring. Because, once again, I realize that I don’t care all that much that I can’t keep track of what’s going on — no more than I care that I can’t keep track of what’s going on in “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Big Sleep” or “Cotton Comes to Harlem.”
At a time when awarding medical degrees to women seemed laughable at best and immoral at worst, Elizabeth Blackwell persisted in making a life in medicine. Her sister Emily followed in her footsteps. In telling their story in “The Doctors Blackwell,” Janice P. Nimura invites us to learn about medicine, well-to-do women and social movements of the 19th century. After delving into the sisters’ letters and papers, the author ably illuminates the Blackwells’ struggles, the opposition they faced and the allies who helped make their success possible.
Where Frostquake triumphs is as metaphor – a network of images that describes how Britain was beginning to unfreeze from the 50s. Nicolson does best with anecdotes that lie far from the beaten track.
Now Great-grandmother comes through the backdoor. Her head latticed like corncribs, her legs tied with chicken wire. Her limbs had been taken quickly apart, bones dismantled, spirit folded up. She moves around the room.