Grace M. Cho's TASTES LIKE WAR is a National Book Award Finalist!
Grace M. Cho’s TASTES LIKE WAR is a finalist for the National Book Award!
The nonfiction finalists are:
Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
Lucas Bessire, Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains
Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir
Nicole Eustace, Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America
Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
The National Book Award winners will be announced the evening of Wednesday, November 17th during the 72nd National Book Awards Ceremony. This event will be livestreamed and open to all, and will be a fundraiser for the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit literary arts organization.
On Tuesday, November 9 there will be a finalist reading in partnership with The New School. (RSVP link coming soon)
Please join us in congratulating Grace!!!
About the book:
“A wrenching, powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience.” —Kirkus Reviews
Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life.
Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her mother’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive.