The District is not an anomaly. Restaurant critics of color are scarce across the country. When newspapers and magazines extend a job offer to a food critic, they anoint them with an unofficial title—arbiter of taste. They’re endorsing a person’s ability to dictate what’s valuable and what’s acceptable, and today’s critics are being asked to review far more than what’s on the plate. No longer can they tip-toe around vital historical context or a chef’s character flaws.
“Restaurant criticism is fundamentally cultural criticism and just as our society isn’t a monoculture, our restaurant critics shouldn’t reflect one,” Korsha Wilson wrote in a February think piece for Eater that addresses the potential blindspots of white critics.
Wilson is one of several writers, including Nikita Richardson, Ernest Owens, and Stephen Satterfield, who have deftly covered the subject. After studying their work, I set out to report with curiosity rather than authority about what D.C. would stand to gain from having critics of color at the table: Greater empathy, more even exposure, and further context.
What then do we make of the 19 stories gathered in “Grand Union,” Smith’s first collection of short fiction? There’s no mistaking the voice, with its mix of assurance and conditionality, her declaration that “ALL THE WORLD IS TEXT.”
That’s hardly a new idea for Smith, who in her 2012 novel “NW” insisted, “People were not people but merely an effect of language. You could conjure them up and kill them in a sentence.” At the same time, there’s something looser about her stories, more offhand.
Though the epigraph is somewhat ubiquitous in contemporary poetry — it can be difficult to find a collection that doesn’t nod to its influences in the opening pages — its very ubiquity seems to have blunted its aesthetic utility. In many books, one feels that the opening epigraph simply says what the poet will, a few pages later, attempt to say for themselves.
However, as with every straw man generalization, exceptions abound: as in Kathleen Graber’s most recent collection, The River Twice, which takes both its title and opening epigraphs from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. Any admirer of Graber’s previous work will be familiar already with her penchant for using the words of others to throw doubt and tension into her own poems. With The River Twice, Graber introduces Heraclitus to a list of thinkers she’s wrestled with before: St. Augustine, Walter Benjamin, Marcus Aurelius, the list goes on.
A girl in disguise, a king in need of protection, and a conspiracy so deep that even those at its heart don't know the whole truth: The Guinevere Deception takes the familiar trappings of Arthurian legend and spins them into an earthy fantasy.