Feed the Hungry
A Memoir with Recipes
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- CHF 12.00
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- CHF 12.00
Publisher Description
An author whose fiction has been praised by Mary Gaitskill ("Passionate, intelligent, and piercingly beautiful...an altogether striking debut") and Darcy Steinke ("Nani Power...shows that sensuality pervades all of life and is too powerful to be contained in the bedroom alone"), Nani Power turns her incredible storytelling talents to memoir, crafting a sublime work of nonfiction centered around a life of travel, eclectic dining, and dealing with her decidedly eccentric Southern bohemian family.
Consumption is the real American pastime. Through the prism of food, we all see our pasts differently. Like the finest food writers, Power brings readers directly into her world through the evocative depiction of the experience of eating. From her childhood on a rambling farm in Virginia -- during which she witnessed a saga of fighting, disowning, silencing, and other regrettable acts -- to her peripatetic and international adult life, Power's reflections are surprising, enthralling, and entertaining. She has a deep understanding of the cuisines of Peru and Mexico, Iran and India; her stints as a sandwich seller in Rio, a waitress in the East Village, a funeral caterer in the Deep South, and on a food junket to Japan all seem familiar as she relates each experience to us through its cuisine. A wealth of detailed recipes throughout the book offer a chance to recreate Power's memories in perpetuity.
Lyrical and uplifting, unflinching and brave, Feed the Hungry is a supple, evocative memoir of food, travel, Americana, and family history, written with all the creativity, tenderness, grit, and verve we have come to expect from this uncommonly gifted writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This rambling memoir takes readers from a Virginia plantation to punk-era New York City, with stops in the Bahamas, Brazil, Japan and other alluring destinations. Power, a novelist and foodie, takes a haphazard approach, with seemingly no organizing principle or purpose other than to share her love of various foods, certain family members, and a few different men. Nevertheless, for every moment of self-indulgence (in both the writing and the eating), there are moments of pure, poetic joy: "My older uncle Harrison... even shot a bear once, and we baked a haunch of it, a massive, fulvous hunk covered in grease as thick as Vaseline." Further, the author takes such obvious pleasure in reminiscing over meals and friends that it's hard not to enjoy them alongside her. For anyone who's never tasted authentic Persian rice, her painstaking description of both preparing and eating the dish makes the crispy-bottomed specialty feel close at hand. Moreover, her recollection of crispy Peruvian chicken "with homemade chunky fried potatoes and a sharp green chile sauce" is positively mouthwatering. A few recipes garnish the end of each chapter, including dishes like Marinara Sauce, Cold Borscht, and the Brazilian stew Feijoada, a selection as idiosyncratic as the memoir itself.