I was not prepared, then, for the wonder that is the fruit sandwich. I did not even know that such a thing existed until I saw it a few years ago on the menu of a tiny Japanese cafe on the Lower East Side, then run by Yudai Kanayama, a native of Hokkaido. It came to the table on wax paper, not a dainty tea sandwich that I could hold with just the tips of my fingers but two triangles as thick as cake and tilted upward to show off their insides: fat strawberries, a golden orb of canned peach and green kiwi with black ellipses of seeds.
Though painful, this beautifully crushing experiment in empathy and brokenness is worth experiencing. Watkins and Tiny Reparations Books have made a bold statement with “Perish” and will both be worth watching for what comes next.
I proudly call myself a fan of Old Hollywood, but until this year I had never seen a Rita Hayworth movie. I’d seen her famous pinup image for LIFE magazine, known vaguely of her as a 1940s “love goddess,” and watched clips of her in Gilda, but I’d never actually viewed any of her onscreen performances until I was reading Jerome Charyn’s new novel Big Red. As it turns out, as magnetic as her performances on screen are, her films aren’t even close to the most interesting part of her story. Written with love and affection for its subject, Big Red is an entrancing work of historical fiction that serves as a glimpse into Rita Hayworth’s life far beyond her stardom.
Donal Ryan’s latest novel is a book of opposing forces. It begins with an ending – the abrupt loss of a character we have only just met – yet concludes with a hope for the people he left behind. Between those events lies a coming-of-age story that explores the challenges of growing up in a tight rural community in 1980s Ireland, and the broader landscape of prejudice, misogyny and family conflict.
In 1970 the philosopher DW Winnicott wrote that there are two types of cooks: “the slavish one who complies” to a recipe and “gets nothing from the experience except an increase in the feeling of dependence on authority”, and the “original one” who casts books or pre-supposed methods aside and surprises themselves with what they can come up with alone. Cooking from a recipe, he asserted, is the antithesis of creativity.
Rebecca May Johnson wholeheartedly disagrees. In her first book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, the British food writer argues that “in his haste to theorise, Winnicott mistakes the recipe text on the printed page for the act of cooking the recipe”. A recipe, she argues, “demands translation into praxis and hangs limp if left languishing in theory only”. If Winnicott had tied his apron strings, picked up a knife and tried out a Mrs Beeton recipe himself, he may like Johnson have learned that a recipe is in fact “the paradox of a constraint that liberates”.
Why will Quentin Tarantino only make 10 films? Because he’s thinking of his “oeuvre,” of course. That’s the “hard-to-pronounce French word for ‘body of work,’ ” writes Evan Puschak. The 20th-century Irish poet William Butler Yeats thought that way too, apparently.
It’s not common for those names to crop up in the same conversation, but the eccentric film director behind “Kill Bill” and “Pulp Fiction,” and the Nobel Prize-winning poet from the past share a fundamental approach that involves considering one’s legacy while in the midst of creating it.