Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

World History and Family Dinner: On Rachel Laudan’s Cuisine and Empire

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1. Of all the methods by which I poisoned myself in college, my frequent trips to McDonald’s have assumed outsize shame in my adult conscience.  Forget the cases of Utica Club, the double cranberry vodkas from the Village Tavern, the array of other substances with which I dulled my wits -- in my embarrassed memory it is the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese that bulked up my ass, muddled my judgment, and transformed me from the sylph-like high-schooler with good accessories and great skin, to a pallid, voracious, bleary-eyed monster.  As years pass, my McDonald’s-going former self assumes increasingly monstrous proportions in my recollection -- as Michael Pollan becomes ubiquitous in New York Times-reading households, books like Salt Sugar Fat hit the Terry Gross circuit, and news stories beam the equally ubiquitous “headless fatty” imagery into our living rooms.  The specter of nine-year-olds so rotund they can barely fit into their schoolrooms has Michelle Obama doing arm-lifts with squads of youngsters.  Today, I live down the street from a McDonald’s, but would no more eat there than I would take a crap in the aisle of the caddy-corner Whole Foods, where I buy even my cat food, where I scrupulously avoid the middle parts of the store unless it’s to get a box of organic pasta, or, if someone is coming over, water crackers upon which to spread my soft, fatty cheeses. Imagine my shock, in this twin state of privilege and indoctrination, when a new book by a food historian invites me to imagine “burger joints more brightly lit than any monarch’s dining room,” places where “ordinary people...could feast on grilled beef on fluffy white bread, accented by a creamy sauce and fresh lettuce and tomato, with perfect French fries on the side.  With the meal...a tall, icy drink, perhaps a shake of milk and ice cream or perhaps a sparkling cola.”  As if that were a good thing.  With no attendant come-down, no pronouncement about our path to dietary and moral ruin, this tableau, argues Rachel Laudan in her wonderful new book Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, represents in many ways the pinnacle of collective human ingenuity -- the work of millennia during which cooks from royal kitchens to the hearths of the nameless masses figured out how to feed themselves and other people.  McDonald’s and places like it represent, she says, “a welcome end to millennia of inequality forcibly expressed by culinary distinctions.” Laudan’s scope, which is the entirety of food production in human history, may seem ludicrous, but her work is in the tradition of world history currently enjoying a kind of vogue.  As Laudan told Elatia Harris in an interview, world historians have been “drawing on decades of detailed historical scholarship to see if they could trace big patterns of disease, warfare, enslavement, ecological change, and religious conversion.  Why shouldn't I jump into the fray and see if there were big patterns to be traced in food?”  Her book thoroughly outlines these patterns, identifying a few major cuisines, what she calls “ordered styles of cooking,” that have played the greatest role in shaping human culinary styles and methods: the “Barley-Wheat Sacrificial Cuisines” of ancient empires located in and around the modern Middle East; the Buddhist Cuisines cohering in the third century B.C.E.; the transformative force of Islam, aided by Mongols; and then Christianity, which Laudan identifies as the major unifying force within European cuisine and then that of the Americas -- first with the early Christian and Byzantine, then the Catholic cuisines of the Habsburg and Bourbon reigns, and finally in Protestant, republican cuisines.  As she traces these currents, Laudan points out the way that engagement between these overlapping world realms created hybrids and permutations, with paella and pilau sharing the same family tree.  As colonial empires expanded, the food of the colonized and enslaved was stamped with a colonial flavor, and vice versa. Throughout history, class dictated the flavor and variety of one’s food, how much fat and sweet one got, and so forth. Cuisines were divided into the vastly different high and humble, and available to the elite and the non-elite accordingly.  Modern cuisines are what Laudan calls “middling cuisines,” tasty food born of a confluence of a political ethos dissatisfied with centuries of monarchy, a mode of Christian religious thought the highest expression of which was the family meal, and a hitherto unimaginable access to food in quantity and variety.  Modern, middling cuisines spread throughout the world with new ways to process wheat, meat, milk, fruit, and vegetables. In industrialized nations in the 20th century, non-elite cooks became able “to turn out a variety of different meals from different culinary traditions, instead of the nineteenth-century pattern of a weekly sequence of meals, or the yet-earlier pattern of a series of minor variations on pottage.” Cuisine and Empire is complex and highly academic, but Laudan is a good writer and her owlish wit pops up just when your eyes are beginning to glaze at the varieties of millet (there are a lot of millets).  There is nothing argumentative or prescriptive about her book -- it is hard to argue with her assertion that “the problems of the diseases of plenty...are surely less appalling than the diseases of poverty.”  But in our current American historical moment it seems breathtakingly transgressive, airing views I have hitherto encountered only on Size Acceptance blogs (which typically avoid defaming specific foods).  Some of Laudan’s findings carry an implicit rejection of things that many of us have lately come to believe -- that McDonald’s is the death knell of civilization, for one.  She also neatly demonstrates the process by which certain ideas become dogma, and how our ideas about food change with our understanding of science, nutrition, religion, and the state at any given moment. Rousseau, as it happens, was one of the early adopters of the Slow Food Movement, believing “that what was natural was as little altered as possible, not an essence achieved by lengthy processing and cooking. Simply boiled vegetables, fresh fruit, and milk...were natural.” In fact, most interventions in food production have been met with backlash on scientific or moral grounds.  Rousseau's vegetables, milk, and fruit were themselves anathema to millennia of culinary philosophies, which held that food was not really food until it was cooked, and spiced, and had undergone a religio-scientific change that varied depending on one’s particular religious cosmology and ideas about nutrition. 2. Reading history typically does two paradoxical things: it tunes you in to the unique, specific fuckery and magic of your own moment, while simultaneously proving the old adage, "Same shit, different day."  Our peculiar historical moment is one in which Michael Pollan and his cohort have hardened hearts against the fast food hamburger, while the fast food hamburger remains the most available thing to eat in large tracts of the country.  Children are told to eat their fruits and vegetables, and presented with lackluster pink wedges.  Great swaths of Americans are hungry, while the non-hungry Instagram sumptuous meals.  A recent New Yorker described an establishment with $15 to $27 entrees as “the ultimate neighborhood restaurant, the type of place where the food hits the sweet spot of being good (not to mention affordable)...”  Food gentrification, Mikki Kendall wrote recently, puts "traditional meals out of reach for those who created the recipes."  Books like Wheat Belly and proponents of the so-called Paleo diet are slowly vilifying grain.  (Laudan’s book does not mention this trend, but nothing could appear more farcical set against the backdrop of her scholarship, which tells us, basically, that grain is civilization.  Liberty, even.) Reading a book like Cuisine and Empire enriches the process by which you understand the world, both as you consider the grand sweep of history and assess your own troubled emotions regarding Hormel canned chili. All people are located within a dense web of spatial, financial, and cultural skeins that will dictate what they eat and how they prepare it.  I found, reading Laudan, that even art was affected. Concurrent with Cuisine and Empire, I happened to read Anita Brookner’s perfect novel The Debut, and I was amazed by how much new information Laudan had equipped me to suss.  The 1950s British heroine wishes to woo a man with chicken casserole; her parents’ louche middle class housekeeper advises her to bake the chicken in Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, but she opts instead for the fancy version from Larousse Gastronomique, with expensive leeks purchased from Harrods.  Her father brings home a half-pound of tongue and a tin of artichoke hearts, after having a “cup of tea, heavily sugared, and served in broad shallow cups.” I’ll take almost any opportunity to think about myself, but it seems important to think about one’s relationship with food, and it is soothing, while reading Cuisine and Empire, to do so against such a vast backdrop.  I am a big eater, a “known pig,” as my husband put it recently when he came upon me circling the unattended Christmas turkey while others set the table.  (I love the soft, dark, fatty parts of a bird’s undercarriage, but at every turkey feast I attend, the knife-wielding patriarch insists on carving a platter of bland, uniformly sliced white meat. I find myself angling for a quiet moment with the carcass, filching discarded pieces of skin from the sink, pulling a perfectly good neck out of the trash.)  A known pig, but over the course of my 20s I have been successfully indoctrinated against certain kinds of fast food and most grocery items that come in packages, which leads to confused, contradictory, and offensive positions on things.  I won’t eat a Keebler Snack Cake, but I will eat an entire salami. I spurn the Olive Garden, but regularly eat a calorie-laden burrito filled with God knows what. I see fellow bus-riders with translucent McDonald’s bags to be fed to young children and feel sad, disregarding my past encounters with the Quarter Pounder and the Whopper. Reading Laudan’s book also happened to correspond with the anniversary of probably the most special thing in my personal food universe.  Seven years ago, I moved to San Francisco and struck up a friendship with three boys who lived down the street, friends of friends I had met on a past visit to the city.  On a whim one afternoon, trying to woo someone probably, I decided to make us all food.  I got a bunch of chicken legs and thighs. I found a recipe on the Internet and marinated the chicken in yogurt with lime zest.  I still remember how beautiful it smelled; my disappointment, when the chicken turned to charred lumps on the baking sheet, was considerable -- the lime hardly perceptible on the blackened skin.  Like all of the really important things that have happened in my life, this was such a non-momentous occasion, such an accident, that I routinely thank divine providence for the instincts of my friends and my unperceiving 22-year-old self.  (Around the time I made the chicken, but not because of it, I struck up a romance with one of the boys.  Within six months we were installed together in windowless apartment in Chinatown, and now we are married.) On a Wednesday night shortly after the chicken incident, one of the boys decided to try something fancy -- fish in parchment paper -- and invited us all to eat it.  Days later, a friend who lived in Oakland got accidentally drunk in San Francisco and stayed over for dinner; she and her husband showed up together the next Wednesday.  The following week, their bandmate and her boyfriend came to what we began calling “Family Dinner.”  Depending on a variety of factors -- how many people were coming, how much cash people had at the time -- the meal was either ambitious, or a staple from our childhood.  I made a mis-spiced version of my mother’s spaghetti with clam sauce; my now-husband made Brunswick stew and strawberry salad.  One of the boys made his Aunt Hazel’s meatloaf. In her interview, Rachel Laudan told Elatia Harris that “the concept of family dinner, much lauded now the world over, is relatively new. The importance of the family meal as the foundation of society and the state is so deeply ingrained in the American tradition that it’s hard to appreciate just how American it is.”  As young and extremely carefree 20-somethings who spent their weeknights drinking $5 pitchers of Busch at the now-defunct Jack’s Club, we conceived of Family Dinner as a pseudo-ironic mimicry of the middle class practice with which we had all grown up.  But seven years later, we are still at it.  The group has grown from four people to 16.  We have a calendar and a Google group, and we get together around 49 Wednesdays out of the year, rotating between approximately seven dwellings.  One person cooks, everyone else brings beer or sometimes wine.  We even have a family name:  We’re the Boehners, and we love each other. We have had six weddings, one divorce, and four babies, with another one on the way. The kids go side by side in the host’s darkened bedroom, like a row of little pod people.  (Our single bedroom also houses the sole bathroom, so when it’s our week we take the litter box out of the laundry room and put the babies there.)  Sometimes our relation to one another seems more familial than friendly.  There are moments when we think that all or some of us are kind of a pain in the ass.  There has even been a feud.  But we have gone from pals who like beer and got a kick out of kitschy weekly dinners, to friends who feed pets or mind one another's children.  People move away and many of them come back; my husband and I moved out of state for three years and returned, partially, I think, because Family Dinner had become the defining feature of our collective social lives, the anchor of our weeks. Rachel Laudan told Harris, “Every time you go into the kitchen, you take your culture with you. As you plan a meal for guests, say, you bring to it assumptions about how to mesh their preferences with yours, about how much it is appropriate to spend on the meal, about how to accommodate their religious or ethical food rules, and about what they believe to be healthy and delicious.” The Boehners are all American.  We are all members of what Laudan would call the “salaried middle class,” although technically some of us earn an hourly wage.  We have all wandered away from some kind of faith tradition (Catholicism, Judaism, Mormonism, a variety of Protestantisms).  Every one of us has been to college or beyond.  We are all white. As an eater, I embody my father -- a self-described human garbage disposal, who wrote a letter to his parents from college telling them, “my whole life changed when I learned to eat raw onion.” But my mother is the source of my feelings about cooking. From her, I inherited the desire to be hospitable, without the finesse of her results.  Her kitchen is always equipped with the makings for a nice salad.  She sets the table beautifully.  Entertaining figured large in her life because she was married to a diplomat; she tells a story about hosting a group of Moroccans and serving a gazpacho that not a single person touched for reasons that remain obscure.  She is an elegant hostess, but she is hard on herself.  And when it’s my turn for Family Dinner and I have a roomful of friends to feed, even these Boehners whom I love, who have seen me cry and fish turkey necks out of the trash, some panicked female spirit inhabits my body, makes break out in sweat over the stove, and snap at my husband. My friends have Smitten Kitchen; my mother had The Silver Palate, The Joy of Cooking, and then those cookbooks that Rachel Laudan describes as being written “by highly educated middle- or upper-class women” to interpret foreign cuisines for American and British readers.  Marcella Hazan’s “peasant hash” was a staple of our household.  I continue the legacy with Claudia Roden’s seminal book The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, and despite the fact that only around four of the many, many recipes that I have followed to the letter have really turned out, I continue to select them for their wholesome “authenticity.” (Like an Anita Brookner heroine, I instinctively feel that nothing from my own food background can compare to "real" food cultures, where they put spoonfuls of mastic into ice water, or eat bergamot preserves.) I now believe that Roden's recipes are actually terrible, or rather, the kind of recipes written for people who already know what they are doing and can thus interpret the shorthand of a veteran cook.  But it’s not Claudia Roden’s fault that I make bizarre choices.  Recently for one of my Family Dinners I found a dish of fried eggs and chicken livers in her book.  Perfect, I thought.  Wholesome, economical, and somehow chic. But my pan wasn’t hot enough, or something, and my eggs dispersed upon contact with my livers, and I ended up with a lumpy lukewarm mud that was unmistakably liver-based in an unpleasing way.  We ran out of ketchup to mask the horror, and my accompanying “Tunisian soup” was just hot fish water.  Only one Family Dinner has been worse (and really only its smell), when a gentleman Boehner made something called burgoo -- a dish once enjoyed, says Laudan, by seamen in the British Navy -- and filled his shared apartment with the odor of garbage. Laudan writes that “national cuisines, like nations themselves, have been created in the last two hundred years," "often in the last fifty or sixty,” and often in response to trends from elsewhere.  And we’ve been through them.  We’ve had “Italian” spag bol (“a popular Sunday dish in Britain”) and lasagna (“staple of the American table”).  Moussaka, a Greek classic to which Laudan writes that béchamel was added in an effort to be Frenchy in the early 20th century.  One of the Family Dinner superstars, who every year cooks a non-Kosher, utterly fantastic Passover Seder for 15 people, once made Japanese ramen, “the instant industrial version of which,” Laudan tells us was, invented after World War II.  One of the best Family Dinners I can remember was put on by two of our artistic members, who did “Big Macs,”  everything but the buns from scratch.  The result was a beautiful, enormous, spectacularly tasty burger that looked the way the Big Mac does in the advertisements, the “grilled beef on fluffy white bread, accented by a creamy sauce and fresh lettuce and tomato” of Laudan’s description, the pinnacle of food access and middling cuisines.  (None of us are vegetarians, and I don’t think it’s totally a coincidence that the one truly abstemious eater among us, who is gluten-avoidant and favors an ayurvedic view of nutrition, often doesn’t come.) When one of our Boehner number was laid off and unemployed for a year, he kept up his rotation but, feeling we needed a reset from increasingly elaborate multi-course meals, heated up packaged tater tots and chicken nuggets and called it “Dad’s family dinner.”  Early in the life of Family Dinner, if no one was equipped to cook, we got a bucket of Popeye’s, a practice which is still known as “Dysfunctional Family Dinner,” although now that we have grown in disposable income and fast food squeamishness, we usually get something else.  It amazes me how easily that cruel moniker of “dysfunctional” came to us.  Even without Laudan to tell us, we obviously share a core belief, presumably imparted by our parents and imbued with a fantastic amount of class privilege, that dinner, cooked by someone and eaten around the table together, is civilized practice, and that a deviation from this practice represents a personal or societal failure.  My mother, most of our group's respective mothers, had a hot a meal on the table many nights of my life.  On the very few occasions when she sent my father and me to Burger King, we were encouraged to smuggle the Whoppers back inside of the house so that the neighbors wouldn’t see. In Laudan’s conception, our middle class, middling cuisines come from a sea change in human history, and demonstrate her assertion that “nothing shows your independence more than being able to choose what you eat.”  And in the Boehners, all of whom have had plenty to eat our whole lives, I see those qualities that Laudan ascribes to the early-modern Protestant cuisine that has most colored the American food experience: a rejection of asceticism, a belief in the family at table, a taste for “middling” foods.  As Laudan puts it, "for the richer part of the world today, dining on high or humble cuisines is not a matter of class determined by one's birth, but a matter of choice."  She is thinking of long-vanished imperial hierarchies, but, obviously, class still affects our food choices in significant ways.  The foods that it is our privilege to scorn, enjoy, or mimic according to our mood, are often the foods most available to poor Americans, who are then shamed for eating them rather than the Rousseauian vegetables and milk.  There is a mind-boggling grocery store across from my local McDonald’s; this is not the case in many neighborhoods. On a personal level, Laudan herself can afford her long view of food history: as she told Harris, "I’ve never acquired a taste for fast-food hamburgers or soft drinks, have never eaten Wonder Bread or its siblings, and cook at home six nights out of seven."  Just as it is easy to call food poison when you don't have to eat it, it's arguably easy to call poison food in the same circumstances.  But what I appreciate about Laudan is her sense of perspective.  She urges us not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and asks us to remember the centuries in which everyone but the highest elite ate “minor variations on pottage” achieved by backbreaking work (typically performed by women) that is still the norm in many parts of the world.  In this context, a caloric and inexpensive meal of soft bread and meat is a revelation.  At the rousing finish to her book, she tells us: The challenge is to acknowledge that not all is right with modern cuisines without romanticizing earlier ones; to recognize that contemporary cuisines have problems with health and equity without jumping to the conclusion that this is new; to face up to new nutritional challenges of abundance without being paternalist or authoritarian; to extend the benefits of industrialized food processing to all those who still labor with pestles and mortars; and to realize that the problem of feeding the world is a matter not simply of providing enough calories but of extending to everyone the choice, the responsibility, the dignity, and the pleasure of a middling cuisine. After reading Cuisine and Empire, I read The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood, a novel about an Enlightenment-era French nobleman who concocts outlandish recipes in the years before the Revolution.  Closing out his journal and recipe book before the mob arrives to slaughter him, the narrator writes: “the rest is history or will be for those who come to write it after us.  I doubt they will be kind, and why would they?  They will see our sins and forget our graces.” The longer Family Dinner goes on, the more real its 1950s nostalgia becomes (recently one of its members suggested that we all learn how to play bridge).  It has become the churchgoing or the Shabbat dinner that gave order to our grandparents’ weeks.  In Laudan’s probing but gentle gaze, we are just modern people, enjoying our middling cuisines on our own terms.  Narrow your scope, and, like a family in a Formica add, we are the exemplars and beneficiaries of myriad injustices in American life: malign food politics, systemic racism, unequal distribution of wealth.  Even with our small apartments and dingy towels, we are the lucky ones. But there are graces to record.  The way new parents relax into themselves while their babies sleep in the next room.  The way a kitchen grows warm with laughter and the heat of the stove.  The way food has made a fake family real.  Like the Sufi poet said: “On the surface of the stew we are dollops of rich grease / And we befriend the yogurt-meatball soup.”