I was happy to contribute a pick to the “Food” category of Longreads’ Best of 2018 roundup. You can read about my choice and many other great examples of food writing here.
Longreads’ Best of 2018
By Irina Dumitrescu
I teach medieval English at the University of Bonn, and write about literature, food, immigration, and dance.
Clean eating in Politico Europe
An essay of mine on the dark side of “clean” eating in German 20th century history was published by Politico Europe, in both print and web. You can read the online version here:
Reprint in Wine Reads
My essay “My Father and the Wine,” originally published in The Yale Review, has been reprinted in Jay McInerney’s anthology of wine writing, Wine Reads.
A Notable in BAE 2018
I’m happy to announce that my essay, “Swan, Late“, published in Longreads, was included in the “Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2017” list in The Best American Essays 2018
Book recommendations
I’ve recently been asking friends and total strangers for their tips on books that transport, inspire, and quite simply help me forget the drudgery of middle age. Here is a list in progress, which I plan to update as more ideas come in. I’ll put in some affiliate links — the gift certificates I get from my US account are handy for buying distant friends gifts, or treating myself to the odd ridiculous purchase. Or, you know, more books. And I’ll mark off volumes as I’ve read them, or add notes of my own.
Leila Aboulela, Minaret (read this, lovely and lyrical)
Ayad Akhtar, American Dervish
Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
Xhenet Aliu, Brass
John Bellairs, The Face in the Frost
Chico Buarque, Budapest
Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
M. F. K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me
Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest
Elizabeth Jane Howard, Cazalet Chronicles
Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World
Han Kang, The Vegetarian (read this, blew my mind, could not put it down)
Anything by R. A. Lafferty
Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet (read this, amazing, exactly what I want in a novel)
Flann O’Brien, The Best of Myles
Anything by Helen Oyeyemi
Anything by Richard Price
Anjali Sachdeva, All the Names They Used for God
James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime
Interview on Deutschlandfunk
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to Dörte Hinrichs at Deutschlandfunk’s program, “Aus Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften” about the work Emma Bérat and I have been doing at the SFB 1167 on women’s power, charisma, and networks. Here is a brief article on the topic, and you can listen to the whole interview on the same page:
Essay on Jarrar, Kahf, and Aboulela
I have a new essay on fiction by emigre Muslim women novelists in a collection published by the NRW Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste. The piece is meant for a nonspecialist audience, and is in German — but I’d be happy to share an English version of it with anyone interested.
Link to a pdf of the published essay is here: Englischsprachige fiktionale Texte muslimischer Autorinnen. Möglichkeiten der Repräsentation
Symposium on Migration
I’m pleased to post a link to a report on a symposium on „Plurale Gesellschaft? – Wirkungen von Flucht und Migration“ that took place on April 12, 2018. The event was organized by the Migration working group of the Junges Kolleg of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. We’ve also put out a book of essays, but for now you can read about the event (in German) here:
Review of Call Me Zebra
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra is a wild, sad novel about exile and the passionate love of literature. You can read my review of it for the Los Angeles Review of Books here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/literature-as-lifeline-the-exile-in-call-me-zebra/
The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature
I’d like to play at cool, but I’m pretty much over the moon at the fact that my book, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature, is now in print. The digital version is already online, and the hard copy is available in Europe. The book will be released in the US on March 31, 2018, at least according to Amazon.
