The Week’s Entrée #19

Tesla by Mark Lingane

Render by Heidi C. Vlach

They built new homes under mountain maples, hoping for luck. But for the aemets — the insect-like folk of Aloftway village — there has been much work and meagre reward. After poor harvests and a brush with forest fire, now wolves are striking down folk who venture into the forest. Without a precedent in their legends to guide them, all aemetkind knows to do is hope and pray.

Rue is a young aemet coming of age in this troubled community. Named after a lucky plant, she has never cared much for luck. She believed from the start that it was folly to move here, and when fellow aemets start turning up dead, Rue is through waiting. With her chemistry skills, her keen mind and a guard dog at her side, Rue promises herself that she’ll solve Aloftway’s problems. But she’ll need help from Felixi, a game hunter of the dragon-like korvi race — who knows more about the wolf attacks than he’s willing to share.

Writing In The Kitchen by David A. Davis

Publication Date: August 1st, 2014/University Press of Mississippi 

Genre: Non-fiction/Essays

Scarlett O’Hara munched on a radish and vowed never to go hungry again. Vardaman Bundren ate bananas in Faulkner’s Jefferson, and the Invisible Man dined on a sweet potato in Harlem. Although food and stories may be two of the most prominent cultural products associated with the South, the connections between them have not been thoroughly explored until now.

Southern food has become the subject of increasingly self-conscious intellectual consideration. The Southern Foodways Alliance, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, food-themed issues of “Oxford American” and “Southern Cultures,” and a spate of new scholarly and popular books demonstrate this interest. “Writing in the Kitchen” explores the relationship between food and literature and makes a major contribution to the study of both southern literature and of southern foodways and culture more widely.

This collection examines food writing in a range of literary expressions, including cookbooks, agricultural journals, novels, stories, and poems. Contributors interpret how authors use food to explore the changing South, considering the ways race, ethnicity, class, gender, and region affect how and what people eat. They describe foods from specific southern places such as New Orleans and Appalachia, engage both the historical and contemporary South, and study the food traditions of ethnicities as they manifest through the written word.

This was my first Netgalley approval!!!! I know this is not the typical book you see here on the blog, but I hope you won’t mind (and Melissa either) to hear about this type once in a while. I love cookbooks and food related books, they really help me out in my career and they are so interesting. I will read it soon. 

Julia, Child by Kyo Maclear