The Sweetest Fruits

Download or read book The Sweetest Fruits written by Monique Truong and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A sublime, many-voiced novel of voyage and reinvention" (Anthony Marra) "[Truong] imagines the extraordinary lives of three women who loved an extraordinary man [and] creates distinct, engaging voices for these women" (Kirkus Reviews) A Greek woman tells of how she willed herself out of her father's cloistered house, married an Irish officer in the British Army, and came to Ireland with her two-year-old son in 1852, only to be forced to leave without him soon after. An African American woman, born into slavery on a Kentucky plantation, makes her way to Cincinnati after the Civil War to work as a boarding house cook, where in 1872 she meets and marries an up-and-coming newspaper reporter. In Matsue, Japan, in 1891, a former samurai's daughter is introduced to a newly arrived English teacher, and becomes the mother of his four children and his unsung literary collaborator. The lives of writers can often best be understood through the eyes of those who nurtured them and made their work possible. In The Sweetest Fruits, these three women tell the story of their time with Lafcadio Hearn, a globetrotting writer best known for his books about Meiji-era Japan. In their own unorthodox ways, these women are also intrepid travelers and explorers. Their accounts witness Hearn's remarkable life but also seek to witness their own existence and luminous will to live unbounded by gender, race, and the mores of their time. Each is a gifted storyteller with her own precise reason for sharing her story, and together their voices offer a revealing, often contradictory portrait of Hearn. With brilliant sensitivity and an unstinting eye, Truong illuminates the women's tenacity and their struggles in a novel that circumnavigates the globe in the search for love, family, home, and belonging.

Download or read book The Sweetest Fruits written by Monique Truong and published by Upswell. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With brilliant sensitivity and an unstinting eye, The Sweetest Fruits illuminates the women’s tenacity and their struggles in this novel that circumnavigates the globe in the search for love, family, home, and belonging. Monique Truong gives voice to three women, Rosa, Alethea, and Setsu, who each tell the story of their life with Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), a globetrotting Greek-Irish writer best known as the author of America’s first Creole cookbook and for his many volumes about the folklore and ghost stories of Meiji Era Japan. An immigrant thrice over, Hearn is now remembered at best as a keen cultural observer and at worst as a purveyor of exotica. In their own unorthodox ways, the three women are also intrepid travelers and explorers. Their accounts witness Hearn’s remarkable life but also seek to witness their own existence and luminous will to live unbounded by gender, race, and the mores of their time. Each is a gifted storyteller with her own precise reason for sharing her story, and together their voices offer a revealing, often contradictory portrait of Hearn. ‘It isn’t only the fantastic Lafcadio Hearn who springs to new life in these pages. The women around him do as well, even as they mix the extraordinary and the ordinary in an exhilarating new way. The Sweetest Fruits is brilliant and heartbreaking–I was transfixed.’ —Gish En, author of Typical American ‘Presented in four courses from the perspective of the women closest to him, The Sweetest Fruits is a feast you’ll want to devour for its arresting metaphors and its beautiful prose.’ —Anita Lo, author of Solo: A Modern Cookbook for One ‘Intimate and sensuous yet majestic in scope, The Sweetest Fruits is a rapturous, glorious novel, extraordinarily alive to the world.’ —Idra Novey, author Those Who Knew ‘Monique Truong has composed a sublime, many-voiced novel of voyage and reinvention. It will cross horizons, yet remain burrowed in your heart.’ —Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena ‘By giving readers a concert of voices, at last singing louder than Hearn’s biography and mythology, Truong asks us to ponder the ways those who are often ignored and marginalized might have their own rich, epic stories worth telling. In that sense, The Sweetest Fruits is a type of justice.’ —Eric Nguyen, author of Diacritics

Download or read book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit written by Jeanette Winterson and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times–bestselling author’s Whitbread Prize–winning debut—“Winterson has mastered both comedy and tragedy in this rich little novel” (The Washington Post Book World). When it first appeared, Jeanette Winterson’s extraordinary debut novel received unanimous international praise, including the prestigious Whitbread Prize for best first fiction. Winterson went on to fulfill that promise, producing some of the most dazzling fiction and nonfiction of the past decade, including her celebrated memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?. Now required reading in contemporary literature, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a funny, poignant exploration of a young girl’s adolescence. Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial North of England and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary comes of age, and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household dissolves. Jeanette’s insistence on listening to truths of her own heart and mind—and on reporting them with wit and passion—makes for an unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving passage into adulthood. “If Flannery O’Connor and Rita Mae Brown had collaborated on the coming-out story of a young British girl in the 1960s, maybe they would have approached the quirky and subtle hilarity of Jeanette Winterson’s autobiographical first novel. . . . Winterson’s voice, with its idiosyncratic wit and sensitivity, is one you’ve never heard before.” —Ms. Magazine

Download or read book The Fruit Hunters written by Adam Leith Gollner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical account of the role of fruit in the modern world explores the machinations of multi-national corporations in distributing exotic fruits, the life of mass-produced fruits, and the author's experience with unusual varieties that are unavailable in America.

Download or read book The Book of Salt written by Monique Truong and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2004-06-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel of Paris in the 1930s from the eyes of the Vietnamese cook employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, by the author of The Sweetest Fruits. Viewing his famous mesdames and their entourage from the kitchen of their rue de Fleurus home, Binh observes their domestic entanglements while seeking his own place in the world. In a mesmerizing tale of yearning and betrayal, Monique Truong explores Paris from the salons of its artists to the dark nightlife of its outsiders and exiles. She takes us back to Binh's youthful servitude in Saigon under colonial rule, to his life as a galley hand at sea, to his brief, fateful encounters in Paris with Paul Robeson and the young Ho Chi Minh. Winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award A Best Book of the Year: New York Times, Village Voice, Seattle Times, Miami Herald, San Jose Mercury News, and others “An irresistible, scrupulously engineered confection that weaves together history, art, and human nature…a veritable feast.”—Los Angeles Times “A debut novel of pungent sensuousness and intricate, inspired imagination…a marvelous tale.”—Elle “Addictive…Deliciously written…Both eloquent and original.”—Entertainment Weekly “A mesmerizing narrative voice, an insider's view of a fabled literary household and the slow revelation of heartbreaking secrets contribute to the visceral impact of this first novel.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Download or read book Sweet and Sugar Free written by Karen E. Barkie and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1982-08-15 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karen Barkie has created over 200 imaginative and easy-to-follow recipes for cakes, pies, cookies, breads, sherberts, custards, and much more sweetened with a variety of fruit and fruit juices-and without one spoonful of sugar. Complete with charts listing the caloric and nutritional values of fruit and fruit juices, tips on baking with a dozen different flours, and instructions for creating hundreds of toppings and fruit combinations.--P. [4] of cover.

Download or read book The Impartial Monitor about Follwing the Fashions. Or, the Sweet Fruit of Sharp Reprehension, in a Rare Example, of One that ... Cured His Wife of Her Costlinesse written by Richard Younge and published by . This book was released on 1656 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: