The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is pleased to award-winning author C Pam Zhang to Harrisburg for a conversation and signing on her new novel, Land of Milk and Honey. In the novel, Zhang delivers rapturous and revelatory narrative about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world. Zhang will be in conversation with Dickinson College Professor, Sheela Jane Menon.
This event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase at the event. To enter the signing line, a copy of the book must be purchased from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore.
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.
About the Author:
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.
Sheela Jane Menon is Assistant Professor of English at Dickinson College, specializing in Malaysian literary and cultural studies. Her current book project examines the contradictions of state multiculturalism by assembling a new cultural archive; once which includes Indigenous life writing alongside Malaysian literature, film, and public performance. Her work has been published in Verge, ARIEL, The Conversation, The Diplomat, and New Mandala. Sheela Jane has served on Governor Wolf's Commission for Asian Pacific American Affairs. She is also proud to be considered a friend of Midtown Scholar Bookstore!
