FOOD NETWORKS
Like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, whose nameless protagonist proclaims, “I yam what I yam,” and Amy Tan’s choreography of labored meals in pointed contrast to American fast food, Lara Vapnyar’s new story collection, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, employs food—the buying, cooking, storing, eating, and ordering of it—to examine fractured identities.
In this slim volume, Vapnyar returns to the story form—her debut collection, There Are Jews in My House (2003), was followed by the novel Memoirs of a Muse (2006)—exploring food as metaphor for the immigrant experience. In these brief,