The Browser have just published an interview with me about five books on Chinese food.
Books
My most recent book, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, is now out in paperback in the UK and worldwide! (The US paperback edition came out in 2009.) Look for it in bookshops, or on Amazon and other online booksellers. With a little notice (usually a couple of weeks), I’m happy to sign dedications and leave the signed books at Barshu restaurant.
The Polish edition of Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper is now out! Do please tell any Polish friends who you think might be interested!
And here is some kind of review of it, which from what I can make out with Google Translate looks pretty good.
Another review (viewed through Google translate!) is here – very favourable too!
I recently finished reading Hilary Spurling’s masterful biography of Pearl Buck, the daughter of American missionaries who grew up in China and became a novelist who introduced many in America to Chinese culture (and won the Nobel Prize for Literature). It was an utterly absorbing read. Among other things it was a sobering reminder of the appalling poverty of pre-revolutionary China, and the extraordinary achievements of the communists in their early days in power – it’s easy to let the horrors of the Anti-Rightist Movement, the post-Great Leap famine and the Culture Revolution obscure this. And the episodes in which Pearl and her family were threatened and turned on by people in a place that felt like home will resonate, at least distantly, with many foreigners who have lived in China. (Peter Hessler, in River Town – another wonderful China book - described a nasty little event in Fuling, his home for two years, when a crowd turned ugly just because he was a foreigner. And it reminded me of the time I was nearly lynched by a hostile crowd in Chengdu, my beloved Chengdu, just after the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.) Continue reading…
My first book, Sichuan Cookery (published in the US as Land of Plenty), was chosen by the Observer Food Monthly as one of the ten best cookbooks of all time! Crazy, but delightful!
I was one of the food-writers invited by the Guardian to choose ‘The Best Food Books of the Decade’… and when they published the list today I discovered that the other panellists had put my first book, Sichuan Cookery (published in the US as Land of Plenty) in the Top Ten! What an honour.
There’s a piece of mine in the Financial Times Weekend today, about the wonderful restaurants of Hangzhou.
And a mention of the paperback of ‘Shark’s Fin’ in the latest New York Times Book Review.
‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper’ has been chosen as the first book featured by the international ex-pat wing of the Daily Telegraph’s website. This is great, except that the discussion so far has been hijacked by people who haven’t read the book, but accuse me of promoting the consumption of shark’s fin!
If they did read the book, of course, they’d discover that there’s a whole chapter about the damage caused by the consumption of bits of endangered species, including shark’s fin.
It’s very weird – the very mention of shark’s fin seems to be a kind of trigger for outrage. This has happened to me before online, and I do wonder if some people do a kind of websearch for the term ‘shark’s fin’, and then automatically post furious messages, without troubling themselves to find out what is actually being said.
Hmm.
The official publication date of the US paperback version of ‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper’ is 25th August, but it’s already available on Amazon.com…
My latest book, ‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper’, has just received The Jane Grigson Award from the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals’!