Hartford Courant

 
Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love by Lara Vapnyar
Enter your email address below and seven days a week a new review will arrive in your mail.

Email address:

Click here to read about Powells.com's privacy policy.

Nourishing Stories From Russian Native
A Review by Carole Goldberg

When Nora Ephron wrote her bitterly comic novel Heartburn and threw in a few recipes to sweeten the effect, she was devising a recipe for other authors to follow.

Since then, novelists including Jan Karon, Laura Esquivel and Diane Mott Davidson have made food an essential ingredient of their books and included recipes for the avid reader. We can now, happily, add Lara Vapnyar to that list.

And more important, we also can note that Vapnyar is one of the increasingly impressive roster of authors who have emigrated from Russia and other Eastern European countries and are now producing, in graceful and nuanced English that seems like their mother tongue, some of our finest contemporary literary fiction.

In Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, she captures, with exquisite description and delicately irony, the loneliness of the outsider, grateful to be living here, yet longing to feel at home.

Vapnyar, who emigrated from Russia in 1994 knowing only a little English, now...
 
Read the entire review
More reviews from Hartford Courant

Previously Reviewed by Hartford Courant
Sort: by date | by title | by author

Cheating at Canasta: Stories by William Trevor

In the best short stories, there's always more going on than the events on the surface. There is tension running along underneath. There will be answers, but the best writers raise questions for the reader to consider long after they close the book. An acknowledged master of the form, William...




 

Three Decades of Quality Writing and Criticism

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, is a non-profit organization consisting of more than 850 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns. To learn about how to join, click here.