As a writer, I understand the absurdity of trying to place restrictions on what can and can’t be written about. Keats defined negative capability as an artist’s ability to transmute an experience or idea into art even if she hasn’t experienced it herself; without it, we’d have no historical fiction, no “Madame Bovary,” no “Martian Chronicles.”
The crux of the issue is that with autism there is often, not metaphorically but literally, a lack of voice, which renders the person a tabula rasa on which a writer can inscribe and project almost anything: Autism is a gift, a curse, super intelligence, mental retardation, mystical, repellent, morally edifying, a parent’s worst nightmare. As a writer, I say go ahead and write what you want. As a parent, I find this terrifying, given the way neurotypical people project false motives and feelings onto the actions of others every day.
“Zaitoun: Recipes From the Palestinian Kitchen,” which is being published in the United States this week by W.W. Norton & Company, documents Ms. Khan’s travels, illuminating the beauty of Palestinian cuisine and the political realities that envelop it.
She described her work as “culinary anthropology,” using food as a medium to foster cultural understanding. “I am very interested in portraying the sum of life’s experience through food,” she said. “That means conveying the challenging bits as well as the joyous sections.”
The relationship between author and translator is, in theory, symbiotic. And when the relationship remains theoretical, because the author can’t read the translator’s translation, it usually stays symbiotic. Problems often arise when the author can read the translation.
Depending on how you categorize snacks in bar form, the market hovers around $5 billion globally. Next time you find yourself in your favorite natural grocers on the hunt for Peruvian chia seeds and California oat milk, take a detour down the bar aisle and stop to take it all in. Carefully laid out in front of you are upwards of 35 brands and 150 individual products: Clif, Epic, Kind, Larabar, Luna, Picky, ProBar, RX, Tanka, Skout, Soyjoy, Taos Mountain, Zing—perhaps dozens more. Although these bars are sometimes barely distinguishable from one another if you remove the wrappers and serve them on a platter, they’re each carefully positioned to target a specific desire among consumers: breakfast, protein, vitality, paleo diet, women’s nutrition, gluten-free diet, and meat (yes, meat), to name a few.
You’ll notice I didn’t include “performance.” Today the myriad iterations that those original sports energy bars birthed are no longer just supplements for the endurance crowd—they’re meals in themselves. “The category started with outdoor athletes, but it expanded,” says Clif Bar’s former senior vice president of brand marketing Keith Neumann. “In terms of growth, bars are unparalleled. It’s the fastest-growing segment in the grocery store.”
I grew up down the street from a doughnut shop, by which I mean: I’m an American. Muffins don’t move me, nor scones, nor sweet rolls, nor any of the breakfast pastries of the world (croissant, cornetto, brioche, kolache). My life has been encircled by doughnuts.
What Obama brings to this genre is, first, a powerful sense of self, which precedes and exceeds her domestic relationships—the book’s three sections are titled “Becoming Me,” “Becoming Us,” “Becoming More”—and, second, a conviction that the roles of wife and mother are themselves undefined. She makes and remakes her relationship to both throughout her adult life.
Li’s narrative experiment proves admirably fit for purpose. A novel in which nothing happens is liable to be dismissed as the result of a writer playing for time. Here, for all his mother’s insistence that Nikolai has nothing to say sorry for, the single defining event is the one thing we wish hadn’t happened; playing for time is the point.
Slice him where you like, Foulds is a very fine writer. Dream Sequence might be a minor entertainment but it fizzes with wit – a book you can read in one enjoyable gulp.
Editor David Kipen has dug up centuries' worth of excerpts about California's largest city. The book, he says, is "a collective self-portrait of Los Angeles when it thought nobody was looking." The excerpts he's picked roughly divide up between Los Angeles as heaven and Los Angeles as hell.
Life is strange and people are odd. That's one of the takeaways from Elizabeth McCracken's wildly entertaining third novel, a wonderfully unpredictable multi-generational saga which revolves around a Massachusetts bowling alley.
With this novel McCracken has, to borrow a term from cricket, bowled a googly. “Bowlaway” is a large and caterwauling sort of opera buffa, packed with outsize characters — some with recherché talents — and wild, often dreamlike events. If this novel were a bar, it would be the kind of joint where the Christmas lights are left on all year long.
Out of albumen and blood, out of amniotic brine,
placental sea-swell, trough, salt-spume and foam,