How dare the most incisive, independent-minded living literary critic writing in the English language also produce serious novels? Does dance critic Alastair Macaulay leap onto the stage and perform Afternoon of a Faun? Does rock writer Jon Pareles grab a Gibson and shred with the Foo Fighters? Does classical music sage Anne Midgette hip-check Emanuel Ax into the concert-hall wings and tear into Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2?
What, then, gives James Wood the right to practice the art he’s spent a lifetime appraising? Check the bylaws. They stipulate that those who can’t do teach and those who can’t teach review. Triple-fie on Wood, then, for he is a critic, a teacher, and a novelist.
On a steamy Friday evening, early last summer, I exited a Korean-made metro train with a crowd of teenagers and parents with young children, who filled the elevated platform at Bridgeport Road with a congenial babble of Cantonese, English, Tagalog and Mandarin. Crossing an expansive parking lot, we entered a makeshift village of canopied stalls, set amid a forest of simulated cherry trees whose LED blossoms lent the turquoise twilight a pinkish hue.
Vendors barked out pitches for Pikachu plushies, fidget spinners with strobing lobes, and Cosplay anime onesies for adults. On a small midway, the roar of an animatronic brachiosaurus was briefly overwhelmed by the jets of a Boeing 787 bound for one of the megacities of mainland China. The unmistakable odor of octopus and squid grilling over charcoal permeated the air.
It could have been the Temple Street market in Kowloon, Hong Kong, or one of Singapore’s open-air hawker centers. But I was on the North American side of the Pacific Ocean, in a city the Chinese have dubbed Fu Gwai Moon (Fortune’s Gate). Richmond, as it is more commonly known, is a suburb-city built on flat islands embraced by arms of the Fraser River that lead into the Salish Sea.
Food in life and books means so many things: Connection. Culture. Inheritance. Science and mystery. Love. And for me, a bridge between the fictional and real. Cooking food from books I love is a way of making the imaginary real, something I can hold in my hands—and eat. It’s magic, a way to make the imaginary come true.
Her ninth cookbook, “Feast: Food of the Islamic World,” was published by Ecco at the end of May. At over 500 pages, the book is backbreaking in size. In it, Ms. Helou traces a line from Islam’s advent in 610 to the glories of the Mughal dynasty. The book’s 300 recipes span continents, traveling to far-flung parts of the world where Islam spread, from Xinjiang to Zanzibar.
Different treatments for deceptively similar dishes reveal the expansiveness of the foodways throughout North Africa, the Middle East and far beyond. In Morocco, she writes, rice pudding is typically milk-based and flavored with orange blossom water. The rice pudding of Turkey, though, usually involves no milk at all, and it’s laced with saffron.
It is hard to overstate the difficulty of the technique Cusk has chosen. It is as if a dressmaker had disavowed fabric in order to make clothes out of air instead. Narrative is so central to the way human beings describe and understand their world that there is a whole branch of psychology devoted to it. Narrative psychologists have noted that by the time people reach old age the majority have organized their life stories in one of two ways: It all came to nothing in the end, one person might conclude, while another will claim that It all came together in the end. These story arcs are so common that they have been given names. The first is called the contamination narrative, the second the redemptive narrative.
Dystopian fiction combines components of reality specific to the time in which it’s written with science or fantasy elements that depict the nightmarish direction we are bending toward. Frankenstein in Baghdad reverses this typical formula: the dystopian elements of the novel are not rooted in its speculative, supernatural elements but rather in the very real, nightmarish violence of 2005 Baghdad.