The World’s Biggest Bookstore closed its doors for good 10 years ago this spring, and the public nostalgia for the store even today is proof of how loved it was, for both casual and passionate readers. And it was the kind of bookstore you don’t see today, where every section overflowed with the latest, greatest and maybe not-so-great. Having everything available at your browsing fingertips felt like a brick-and-mortar Amazon, but with smiling staff whose knowledge of, say, Canadian literature or hip-hop magazines levelled up this bookcore experience.
In the 20th century, as Siam became Thailand and Malaya became Malaysia, both countries used food as a tool to establish modern national identities. Far from the border, government ministries and capital residents began to distinguish their food cultures from their Southeast Asian neighbors. Two purportedly distinct food identities emerged, contained by a set of unique national dishes like pad thai and nasi lemak, even though the countries grew similar produce and shared pantry ingredients.
Yet people in southern Thailand and northern Malaysia continued cooking foods that defy this sort of tidy nationalization, part of a larger, ongoing — sometimes violent — struggle to maintain identities along the border.
When I’d interviewed for the gig, I’d been warned that Judith had a certain “New England” reserve and could be hard to get to know; words like “prickly” and “formidable” had been used to describe her. That hadn’t been my first experience of Judith, but, nervous all over again once we were officially on professional terms, I’d doubted myself, succumbing to the tropes long used to demonize powerful women. And so, when Judith had suggested lunch, I’d assumed that she would present me with a finished meal. That she would want to present herself to me the same way: Composed. Complete. That she wouldn’t want me to witness her in the process of making.
Judith’s performance of formality, I’d soon learn, was but a practiced facade, an affect she’d spent her life using to gain entry to spaces reluctant to let women through, and as a protective shield wherever, whenever, and with whomever she wasn’t sure it was safe to drop her guard.
By which I mean: I was wrong.
Music can affect your mealtime, just as it can affect all human experiences to some extent. But what if music were treated not just as background to your food, but as an ingredient? Can music go beyond ambience, to directly enhance and complement tasting, chewing, swallowing? Can music be not just “the food of love,” as Shakespeare wrote in the opening of Twelfth Night, but the food of … well, food?
Often playful but still powerful, the messaging within this collection encourages the reader to pay more heed to the world of which they are a part and in which they live. Humans are not presented as evil but rather drifting, often mindlessly. That this will lead to their eventual destruction is made obvious without the need to articulate.
An impressive and always engaging debut from a writer whose future work I now look forward to reading. Original and entertaining, these stories make full use of the form to hold attention in a world designed to distract from critical thinking.
The teenager’s experiences show us not only the lack of agency girls and women had in the 19th century, but serves as a reminder of the battles still fought for female autonomy today.
A philosopher by training (she calls herself a “possibly eternal PhD candidate” at Harvard), Rothfeld is skilled at drawing on markedly different perspectives and contexts to build a broad, cohesive argument. Over the course of a dozen essays, she treats the cinema of David Cronenberg as seriously as television police procedurals, while Marie Kondo’s war on clutter receives as much consideration as the philosophy of John Rawls and Amia Srinivasan. Because, while many think aesthetic values grow out of moral ones, Rothfeld suspects the opposite may be true: we don’t judge to be beautiful that which confirms our existing moral views; we discover serious moral positions embedded in beauty. Bearing this in mind throughout her collection, Rothfeld doesn’t want to convince her reader of any particular stance as much as she wants to evangelize a broader critical orientation—one defined by sustained, energetic engagement with the object.