Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

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Small Fires membahas salah satu pekerjaan rumah tangga yang seringkali disepelekan: memasak. Misalnya, 1) perempuan yang memasak terlihat bahagia, 2) memasak adalah tanda cinta, 3) dan yang paling sering kita dengar, love is the secret ingredients. Namun, penulis kurang setuju dengan stereotipe ini. Laurel (because I know you're reading this!)--there is so much about the Odessy (and specifically Emily Willson's translation of it!) in this (she studied it in school), you would love this!!! I particularly enjoyed the essay “Again and Again, There Is That You,” in which Johnson determinedly if chaotically cooks a three-course meal for someone who might be a lover. The mixture of genres and styles is inventive, but a bit strange; my taste would call for more autobiographical material and less theory. The most similar work I’ve read is Recipe by Lynn Z. Bloom, which likewise pulled in some seemingly off-topic strands. I’d be likely to recommend Small Fires to readers of Supper Club. In Small Fires , Rebecca May Johnson reinvents cooking -- that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, spattering red hot sauce on our books -- as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking is about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the transformative dynamics of shared meals; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe, beyond words or control. Radical, liberating, challenging -and at times emotional, this book really does help awaken (and rekindle), the little fires burning within all of us foodie feminists!

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - Goodreads Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - Goodreads

Jonathan is so open to Vittles evolving, incorporating new voices, incorporating new editorial practices, incorporating new media. He isn’t one of these founders who is like, “This is my thing and it has to be like this.” Someone has a notion or an idea; we can explore it. One of the most original food books I’ve ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious’ Olivia Laing Small Fires is a book about cooking. But no, like, it is *about* *cooking*. As in, it is about the specificity of cooking, or, no, the universality of cooking? Or no I think it is actually, literally, about how cooking and recipes contain the means to be specific and universal at the same time - which is an almost unique, or at least very unusual and remarkable, operation that tends to get glossed over, and so proves worthy of an extended study. Fans of Korelitz’s deft literary mystery You Should Have Known will find plenty to relish in this character-driven tale of privilege, family dysfunction and belated personal growth. At its centre are the Oppenheimer triplets: smart, arrogant Harrison, overshadowed oddball Lewyn, and secretive Sally. The products of a marriage tethered to a tragic car crash years earlier, they were conceived via IVF; a fourth embryo was frozen, and on their departure for college in the year 2000, their mother has it thawed and enlists a surrogate, resulting in the birth of Phoebe, who will narrate the novel’s closing section. Each new twist triggers bright, witty insights into the complexities of sibling bonds as well as art, infidelity and more. This joyful, revelatory work of memory and meditation both complicates and electrifies life in the kitchen.

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Tell me about how you envisioned and sold Small Fires , especially because it is so experimental and form-breaking.

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - AbeBooks Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - AbeBooks

I didn’t make any changes. My editor at Pushkin loved the weirdest bits the most. I was expecting to be told off; I sent them a much weirder book than I said I was going to write. And Small Fires speaks too to part of why these Greek myths and epics have resonated for so long. They stand so many retellings (of which there is a boom atm) yet so few of these retellings outlive the cultural moment that bore them, because they’re stories about systems and phenomena, or about a people far more than so than about *a person*, which we keep trying to personalise. It’s fun then to read Small Fires in the light of, e.g. Miller’s Circe - Miller charts individual and subjective emotional courses and throughlines (which when her books are working feel credible, when they’re not they don’t) through texts that can read as psychologically quiet distant or inscrutable when approached more directly (and a good section of Small Fires, drawing on Emily Wilson’s work, pulls into focus the operations translators have performed in relation to Odysseus’s reassertion of power through the massacre of slave-women - I think whether translators have downplayed, elided or tried to excuse his choice - a driver has been an effort to render something by modern standards psychologically inscrutable as legible). Something I enjoyed about RMJ’s book, arriving in this context, is that follows the other course, the Odyssey as an account of systems. One of the most original food books I’ve ever read, at once intelligent and sensuous, witty, provoking and truly delicious.” -- Olivia LaingThere’s a psychoanalyst, poet, and nonfiction writer, Nuar Alsadir. She published a book called Animal Joy, and she wrote an essay about going to clown school. There’s a useful bit about a clown: The clown that’s overly fixated on the audience can’t clown. She talks about it in the context of writing: People who have this fantasy of being published in the New Yorker write what they think an editor at the New Yorker would like to read. This strange thing exists between them and this imagined audience, when really, you need to tap into your own freaky clown self to write something that’s truthful and authentic. It’s also kind of a collective voice: Many people have contributed, over very long periods of time, to the knowledge contained in a recipe, whether it be explicitly those processes or an understanding of every ingredient in it. My writing practice didn’t come from a food writing professional career, so I didn’t have that hampering professionalism. It came out of me writing playful papers during my thesis, doing funny installations, and my poetry clubs. I’d had a career of journalism about fashion, which I found utterly deadening, ultimately, and very repetitious. You write for different publications in the tone they want, the style they want; there isn’t space for you being a freak. You’re an editor at Vittles , the publication Jonathan Nunn started during the pandemic . How does that work fit into this and the type of food writing you’d like to see more of? I loved a recent mixed-media piece by Aaron Vallance about his family’s songs at Shabbat lunch , for example. I went from not being able to sink into this book, to largely enjoying it by the end. When it's tagged as 'an epic in the kitchen' I didn't realize just how literal that would be. But it's not just the food that makes this a standout book, but rather the way the author weaves philosophy, feminism, and sociology, although with a dash of classics into the mix.