New Internationalist has shared an excerpt from its new collection of short stories, Cooked Up: Food Fiction from Around the World.
The book, compiled by Elaine Chiew, contains a series of stories inspired by food and cooking, including contributions from Ben Okri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Pippa Goldschmidt.
Read Kenyan author Mukoma wa Ngugi’s piece, “Walking the Wok”, in which a wok washed with soap causes students at a culinary school in a small town in Kenya to question the nature of culture:
Excerpt from Cooked Up: Food Fiction from Around the World by Books LIVE
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About the book
Food is our common ground, bringing together families, communities and cultures. How we cook and eat can tell us a lot about ourselves. Food can evoke memories good and bad; can be symbolic of where we come from or where we want to be.
Celebrating this universal experience, Cooked Up, compiled by Elaine Chiew, draws together authors from all over the world, each bringing to the table a unique literary interpretation of the food theme.
A young man attempts to avoid military service by over-eating … a woman re-enacts her husband’s infidelities with fish bones … students at a cookery school war over woks … a food bank visitor gets more than she bargained for … meals are prepared and shared from Cambodia to an Indian kitchen in the US, from Russia to war-torn Croatia.
These are mere glimpses into the rich variety of short stories (including flash fiction) contained in this book — a veritable treat for the senses and an uplifting cross-cultural reading experience.
It features international literary figures such as Ben Okri, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Mukoma We Ngugi and emerging writers such as Krys Lee, Nikesh Shukla, Pippa Goldschmidt and Elaine Chiew.
About the author
Mukoma wa Ngugi is the author of Nairobi Heat, which introduces the detectives Ishmael and O. His fiction has been shortlisted for the 2009 Caine Prize and the 2010 Penguin Prize for African Writing. His columns have appeared in The Guardian, International Herald Tribune, and The Los Angeles Times, and he has been a guest on Democracy Now, Al Jazeera, and the BBC World Service. His essays and poetry have been included in a number of anthologies as well as in his own poetry collection, Hurling Words at Consciousness. Ngugi was born in 1971 in Evanston, Illinois, the son of the world-renowned African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and grew up in Kenya before returning to the United States for his undergraduate and graduate education. He is currently a professor of English at Cornell University.
Book details
- Cooked Up: Food Fiction from Around the World by Ben Okri and Mukoma wa Ngugi, edited by Elaine Chiew
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EAN: 9781780262147
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Image courtesy of Mukoma wa Ngugi