Category — Books

YumSugar posted about an interesting book called “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats” by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio.

It has portraits of families, surrounded by the food they eat during the course of a week, and provides a visually interesting index of culinary lifestyles around the world for you to compare.

There are 30 families in 24 countries, and each of them are profiled with a small story, a full shopping list (with prices) and a family recipe.

From the book, here are the Ukita family of Kodaira City, Japan. Their food expenditure for one week: 37,699 Yen or $317.25. Their favorite foods: sashimi, fruit, cake, potato chips.

Technorati Tags: Books, cuisine, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, world

[Read more →]

This book was first published in 1997 (symbolic?) and contains a superb collection of 16 short stories that serve up slices of British Chinese culture.

If you’re British Chinese and grew up in the UK, you’ll easily recognise the scenarios that the diverse authors have placed their characters in. In fact, the book will probably reach out to anyone who has experienced the meeting of two (or more) cultures and offers itself as a thoroughly entertaining read.

I bought a copy when Dim Sum was first published, and only recently stumbled upon it again when going through my things. I didn’t hesitate to post about this, as to me, the book stands as a valuable record of the British Chinese cultural experience.

“Dim Sum will open your mind and open your eyes to a new vision, a new voice of the British Chinese.” David Yip – British Chinese actor, best known for the lead role in the 1981 BBC drama The Chinese Detective

Get Dim Sum: Little Pieces of Heart at Amazon, before it goes out of print!

Technorati Tags: Books, British Chinese, dim sum, short stories

The 2005 Pearl Award winner for Creative Excellence Xiaolu Guo has been nominated for a £30,000 Orange Prize.

The 33-year-old, who wrote her first English novel in in 2002, is nominated for her romantic comedy, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.
Xiaolu’s book is deliberately written in bad English and tells the story of a Chinese woman sent to London by her parents to study. Her heroine quickly renames herself Z after arriving at Heathrow, because no one can pronounce her name. She soon discovers, however, that she is no better at English.
Z winds up lodging with a Chinese family in Tottenham, North London but, when she meets a man, she enters a new world of sex, freedom and self-discovery. And although her English improves, she still struggles to understand him.
Other nominees for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction are Rachel Cusk, US Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Tyler, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Indian writer Kiran Desai.
The winner of the award, which is in its 12th year and honours women writers, will be announced at a ceremony on June 6. Good luck Xiaolu!

Article from The Metro
guoxiaolu.com
The Pearl Awards
Buy “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers” at Amazon

Technorati Tags: Books, culture, United Kingdom, Xiaolu Guo

Eric Feng has a clean, illustrative style that combines East, West, nature, the mechanical, fantasy and reality. The creatures and contraptions on his site are wonderful creations that I wished I had come up with. I first saw his work a few years ago, but have only just come across his beautifully bound book, Fevolution: The Art of Eric Feng, which I’ve just ordered and received!

Visit Feric.com

Technorati Tags: art, design, Eric Feng, illustration