Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love by Lara Vapnyar

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...

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