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C Pam Zhang - Land of Milk and Honey

  • Solid State Books 600 H Street Northeast Washington, DC, 20002 United States (map)

Join authors C Pam Zhang & Kat Chow as they discusses Zhang’s new novel,

Land of Milk and Honey.

Please purchase a copy of the book & reserve a seat on Eventbrite here.

The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world.

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent, mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world's troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.

In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.

Born in Beijing, C Pam Zhang is mostly an artifact of the United States. She is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature; nominated for the Booker Prize; and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Zhang’s writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree.

Kat Chow is a reporter and writer, and the author of Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing), named a New York Times Notable Book. She was a reporter at NPR, where she was a founding member of the Code Switch team and podcast. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, New York Magazine’s The Cut and on Radiolab, among others.

This event will be in-person, and at the authors request, we will ask that attendees be masked. Masks will be provided, though not mandated. If you wish to speak with the author & have your book autographed following the talk, a mask will be required.

There will not be a streaming, or video presentation during or after this reading. There also will not be a recording made available later at the mutual decision of the store & the artist. Thank you for your understanding.

Earlier Event: September 30
Storytime - Be Who You Are Day
Later Event: October 5
Knits n' Yarns