Audiobooks Narrated by Elyse Dinh

The Best American Food Writing 2023

A collection of the year’s top food writing, selected by prolific food writer and author of How to Cook Everything Mark Bittman. 'In almost any culture, at any time, you can find food writing,” writes guest editor Mark Bittman in his introduction. “Food means growing and hardship, and health and medicine, and work and holiday. In its abundance it is a gift and a joy, and in its absence a curse and a tragedy. If a culture has writing, that culture has food writing.” The stories in this year’s Best American Food Writing are brilliant, eye-opening windows into the heart of our country’s culture. From the link between salt and sex, to Syrian refugees transforming ancient Turkish food traditions, to the FDA’s crusade on alternative non-dairy milk options, to Black farmers in Arkansas seeking justice, the scope of these essays spans nearly every aspect of our society. This anthology offers an entertaining and poignant look at how food shapes our lives and how food writing shapes our culture.  THE BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING 2023 INCLUDES JAYA SAXENA • LIGAYA MISHAN • MARION NESTLE TOM PHILPOTT • WESLEY BROWN • ALICIA KENNEDY CAROLINE HATCHETT • AMY LOEFFLER and others  

Mark Bittman, Silvia Killingsworth (Author), Anthony Rey Perez, Carolina Hoyos, Chanté Mccormick, Dylan Moore, Elyse Dinh, Johnny Rey Diaz, Justin Chien, Nikki Massoud, Terrence Kidd, Will Tulin (Narrator)

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Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter

'A brilliant duet and a moving exploration of the American immigrant experience.'--Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being A dual first-person memoir by the acclaimed Vietnamese-American novelist and her thoroughly American teenage daughter In 1975, thirteen-year-old Lan Cao boarded an airplane in Saigon and got off in a world where she faced hosts she had not met before, a language she didn't speak, and food she didn't recognize, with the faint hope that she would be able to go home soon. Lan fought her way through confusion, and racism, to become a successful lawyer and novelist. Four decades later, she faced the biggest challenge in her life: raising her daughter Harlan--half Vietnamese by birth and 100 percent American teenager by inclination. In their lyrical joint memoir, told in alternating voices, mother and daughter cross ages and ethnicities to tackle the hardest questions about assimilation, aspiration, and family. Lan wrestles with her identities as not merely an immigrant but a refugee from an unpopular war. She has bigoted teachers who undermine her in the classroom and tormenting inner demons, but she does achieve--either despite or because of the work ethic and tight support of a traditional Vietnamese family struggling to get by in a small American town. Lan has ambitions, for herself, and for her daughter, but even as an adult feels tentative about her place in her adoptive country, and ventures through motherhood as if it is a foreign landscape. Reflecting and refracting her mother's narrative, Harlan fiercely describes the rites of passage of childhood and adolescence, filtered through the aftereffects of her family's history of war, tragedy, and migration. Harlan's struggle to make friends in high school challenges her mother to step back and let her daughter find her own way. Family in Six Tones speaks both to the unique struggles of refugees and to the universal tug-of-war between mothers and daughters. The journey of an immigrant--away from war and loss toward peace and a new life--and the journey of a mother raising a child to be secure and happy are both steep paths filled with detours and stumbling blocks. Through explosive fights and painful setbacks, mother and daughter search for a way to accept the past and face the future together.

Harlan Margaret Van Cao, Lan Cao (Author), Elyse Dinh, Elyse Dinh-Mccrillis, Vyvy Nguyen (Narrator)

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