But plastic’s promise to put a barrier between us and the world conceals a more fundamental truth: that we confirm the world, and ourselves in it, by touch. Working in concert, the senses of touch and proprioception (the body’s awareness of its own position and movement) define us in space; by touch, we know ourselves to be embodied. Texture, friction, and grain speak the world back to us. “Everything we love or lose,” wrote Fernando Pessoa, “brushes our skin and thus reaches our soul.” Touch composes us: we metabolize it, drawing it into ourselves.
Say what you will about Britain just before and after the Great War, it was a golden age for “light” fiction. Think of Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat (“To Say Nothing of the Dog”), Saki’s languidly witty short stories, P.G. Wodehouse’s musical comedies without the music, or E.F. Benson’s delicious Mapp and Lucia novels. These are merely the most celebrated among the period’s numerous works of comic refreshment.
The British critic’s vow to accentuate the positive is not a sign of taking responsibility but of shirking it, a refusal to address the real problems in the restaurant industry. Restaurant critics are the appointed arbiters of eating culture, leading public opinion on the key dining questions of the day, and pledging to “sheath” their pens until the “good times return” is akin to a general who will only step onto the battlefield during peacetime. Finding clever ways to insult soggy vegetables has never been a full realization of a critic’s talent and intelligence—and right now, the food world needs that intelligence and experience more than ever.
By making Kazu’s memories the emotional motor of the story, however, Yu guides readers away from the spectacle of homelessness in order to more meaningfully consider the human beings behind the stereotypes we so easily fall back on.
Any carnivore will tell you: Sometimes you enjoy a cut of meat more for its flavor than its tenderness. A rich bavette steak, a crisply fried pig’s ear, a long-simmered mutton roast.
“A Certain Hunger,” Chelsea G. Summers’ debut novel, requires some chewing, and that is mostly — as Martha Stewart would put it — a good thing.
Every poem an elegy,
Each moment of breath is a debt owed the dead.
The survey says all groups can make more money
if they lose weight except black men . . . men of other colors
and women of all colors have more gold, but black men