fall 2023
where i remember i need to update this!
Hello everyone,
I keep meaning to update this newsletter and forgetting, and before you know it, it’s November and the last entry was almost 4 months ago. Time is a construct lol. And 2023 has been a stacked year for new book releases, so I’ve been busy reading. There’s a new Zadie Smith novel I’m rather looking forward to and waiting for my hold at the library, and the legend of tiny stories herself, Lydia Davis, has a new short story collection that is also high up on my TBR.
Because this is my space and I do what I want, I want to talk about food. Maybe it's just me falling prey to seeing-Jesus's-face-in-toast syndrome/confirmation bias/whatever you want to call it while working on writing a couple things where food features prominently, but I've been noticing a bunch of people writing fictional stories about food as of late. I was originally going to reserve this update to another topic, but I want to talk about food books and stories. (BTW I also have a food story here that was published last year about a reluctant vampire hunter.)
Family Meal by Bryan Washington
Bryan Washington's first novel, Memorial, which is about a couple falling out of love, made me feel all kinds of things. If I hadn't seen his Wikipedia entry and if the book didn’t have a bio, I would have guessed he was Asian given how realistic the family dynamic between the Japanese-American POV character and his mother was and how they talked about food. It was a no brainer for me to put a hold on Family Meal when I heard it was coming. The sections about Kai, who is the MC Cam’s dead boyfriend, brought him to life and made Cam’s spiral more devastating. The first half of the book focuses on Cam and the second on TJ, Cam’s childhood friend. The section featuring TJ, who works at his family’s bakery and is biracial (Korean and Black), highlights how important food is to both cultures. Bryan Washington does it again. I had to put the book down to cry during the final section of the book. I cried through most of Family Meal tbh. 10/10 would recommend.
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
This was a tough read. Not in a bad way, but it’s not a novel you can inhale. I had to read it chapter by chapter and took pretty long breaks between each chapter. I’m a big C Pam Zhang fan. I loved How Much of These Hills Was Gold, which came out in 2020 right in time for me to enjoy it when I had too much time on my hands, so much so that it inspired me to write my own story that takes place in the Old West (along with Tom Lin's novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu). The food descriptions are gorgeous, and the concept of rich people building gated neighborhoods on mountains where they can eat while everyone else starves feels all too plausible.
Less new but still one of my fave food stories: Colonel Sanders by K-Ming Chang is about a girl raised by a single mother whose mother told her her father is Colonel Sanders when she was a kid and she actually believed it. It’s quite funny.
Netflix’s live action One Piece
Netflix did a great job with this! I want to visit the floating restaurant Baratie real bad, and good old Sanji has been inspiring my brother to level up his cooking game 😂 Anyway I’m excited for S2! I will be very slowly catching up with the manga in the meantime.
Pub Updates
Very excited to finally be able to anonunce I'll have a story in Neon Hemlock Press's queer gothic horror anthology coming out early 2024. It’s an honor to be in here! The TOC (that’s Table of Contents for those you less aware of writer lingo) is stacked AF. They’re also doing a preorder bonus, so check it out if gothic horror is up your alley.
Four Self-Care Secrets for a Long and Happy Life (Lightspeed, October 2023): Really excited to have this silly flash about a scummy self-help salesperson fox spirit in Lightspeed! Fun fact that I wrote one of my college admissions essays when I was in a senior in high school about a Ken Liu story that I had originally read in Lightspeed, so I got to complete the publishing circle of life!
Stingy, Three Ways (Sundog Lit, Fall 2023): I moved a bunch between 2020-2023 and now consider myself an expert at moving. My moves inspired this story about three siblings and their poor coping mechanisms after one of them gets divorced. No speculative elements in this one.