Mumbai New York Scranton
A Memoir
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4.7 • 11 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An extraordinarily moving memoir from an iconoclastic new talent—an artist, cook, and illustrator whose adventures at home and abroad reveal the importance of living life with your eyes wide open.
Best known for her witty illustrations, and as a cook beside her mischievous father in her family’s legendary Manhattan restaurant, in Mumbai New York Scranton, Tamara Shopsin offers a brilliantly inventive, spare, and elegant chronicle of a year in her life characterized by impermanence. In a refreshingly original voice alternating between tender and brazen, Shopsin recounts a trip to the Far East with her sidekick husband and the harrowing adventure that unfolds when she comes home. Entire worlds, deep relationships, and indelible experiences are portrayed in Shopsin’s deceptively simple and sparse language and drawings.
Blending humor, love, suspense—and featuring photographs by Jason Fulford—Mumbai New York Scranton inspires a kaleidoscope of emotions. Shopsin’s surprising and affecting tale will keep you on the edge of your seat.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Graphic designer, illustrator and short-order cook Shopsin can now add author to her r sum . The author chronicles a bumpy year in her life with brisk, brief paragraphs: her trip with her husband to India; her work as a short-order cook in the family restaurant, Shopsin's, in Manhattan; the couple's life in Scranton, Pa., as freelancer designers; and weathering a serious illness. Diarylike entries are punctuated by Shopsin's spare drawings and her husband's photographs. During their trip to India, Shopsin seemed to be suffering with a nasty stomach ailment. Sick and stuck in the bathroom, Shopsin writes she couldn't stop puking, yet she nevertheless observes that the elaborate embroidered hot water bottle covers provided by hotel staff remind her of props from Little Women. On her father's penmanship: "My dad used to handwrite the specials on a dry erase board at our restaurant. He would add and delete items weekly with nail polish remover. I still think of his handwriting as smudged capital letters." Initially Shopsin's style is a bit jarring, as if you were reading idle jottings lifted haphazardly from a journal. What could have become merely an amalgamation of keen observations, Shopsin has instead spun into a charming, rewarding, and unusual narrative.
