Author: Kendra Winchester

I didn’t expect to be listening to Tiny Beautiful Things while flying across the country to visit family in California. But there I was, tearing up on a late direct flight as Cheryl Strayed dealt out her incredibly thought-provoking advice. 

Strayed began writing anonymously as Sugar for an advice column on The Rumpus over a decade ago. She answered letters requesting advice, often sharing intimate memories from her own life. She had a way of creating deep emotional intimacy and teasing free the subtleties of the letters she answered.

I have to admit, I struggle to find self-help books that I like. Perhaps this is a fault of my personal taste (feel free to send me recommendations for your favorites!), but sometimes I find a book like Tiny Beautiful Things that knocks my socks off and reminds me of how helpful this genre can be.

She answers many questions about relationships, parenting, dealing with loss, and friendship. But she gives advice in a way that validates these common and relatable questions. In one question, she answers a teenager about why it’s important to understand that your friends will inevitably date people they don’t like. She writes to a trans man who has had a difficult relationship with his parents. She writes to new moms and older moms. But whoever she’s writing to, she invests her whole heart.

Strayed’s columns remind me that I’m not the only one who struggles with navigating life’s ups and downs. We’ve all struggled with similar things. And during those times the answers might be staring us square in the face, but we still wonder if we are doing the right thing. I think this is why the book works. We all have moments in our life where we might know the answer, or maybe we just need reassurance. Whatever it is, Strayed seems to know just what to say.

In this 10th anniversary edition, Strayed adds some columns that she wrote for her Substack, the newest manifestation of her column. So if you’re like me and missed the Tiny Beautiful Things phenomenon the first go around, now is the perfect time to jump on the bandwagon. Plus, if you’re an audiobook fan, she performs the audio!

As a food lover who lives in the South, I’m always looking for more books that sit at the intersection of cuisine and culture. Founding Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance John T. Edge gives us all of that and more with his wonderful book The Potlikker Papers. Edge writes about how the South’s culture is reflected in cuisine. He takes us on a tour of the American South, along the way to describe the key places and why they have become landmarks for Southern Cuisine.

Edge is part of the new South, a growing cultural movement that aspires to make a better South, much in the vein of The Bitter Southerner’s famous campaign. The Potlikker Papers writes about Southern cuisine from this more progressive perspective, giving us the history of Southern food, both the good and the bad.

Edge gives a very broad overview of Southern food, describing the various communities that helped create modern Southern cuisine and illustrating how it will continue to evolve over the coming decades. Most importantly, he notes vital contributions of Black chefs throughout the years. He describes how Southern cuisine would not exist if not for these incredible taste makers who are in many ways the cornerstones of Southern cooking.

I especially love the audiobook, which Edge performs himself. There’s just something perfect about listening to Edge’s incredible accent as he describes mouth-watering dishes. I think it’s also important to note that The Potlikker is just an overview, one tile in the mosaic of Southern food. Books like, High on the Hog and The Cooking Gene are key texts about the contribution of African Americans to Southern Cuisine. And chefs like Edna Lewis have done incredible work on bringing Southern Appalachian foodways to the forefront of Southern Cuisine. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. 🙂

Back in grad school, I remember spending every possible moment pouring over texts, constantly mulling over ideas of why and how we read. Since then, I’ve been kept busy by a gazillion different things and haven’t had time to think much about ideas around reading. So when I saw Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now, I had to pick it up and take advantage of the opportunity.

In her introduction, Castillo says, “When I talk about how to read now, I’m not just talking about how to read books now; I’m talking about how to read the world now.” In the rest of the collection, Castillo examines books, film, art exhibitions, and more. To her, “reading” means thinking critically about the art and media we consume.

Castillo also discusses how the world reads her as the daughter of Filipinx immigrants from a working class background. She argues that reading is political, that we bring our understanding of the world to our interpretations of literature, film, and other media. She pushes for readers to think beyond the buzzwords — like “diverse,” “inclusive,” and “positive representation”— to change how we view where literature comes from as a whole.

But Castillo doesn’t just discuss her ideas around reading; she puts them into practice. In the essay, “Reading Teaches Us Empathy and Other Fictions,” Castillo examines Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke’s Across, asking why Handke believes that his work is apolitical and should just be appreciated for what it is. In “Main Character Syndrome,” Castillo discusses the work of Joan Didion, pushing against the idea that a settler colonial writer can be “the” voice of California.

Castillo does not hold back her critiques of literary darlings. Instead, she boldly calls for all literature — including treasures of the modern literary world — to be viewed from an anti-imperialist viewpoint. We can appreciate Austen AND acknowledge that her family benefitted monetarily from the slave trade at the time.

While this newsletter will never do this collection of essays justice, I hope you will take the leap and pick up this book. But be forewarned, it’s not for the faint of heart. Prepare to be challenged.

When I finished “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak,” the title story and last one in the collection, I had to take a moment to process Jamil Jan Kochai’s stunning method of storytelling. Like every good short story collection, each story stands on its own, but they also all work together to give readers broader themes and ideas. 

The first story, “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” features a teenaged Afghan American boy mesmerized by a video game where the primary goal is to run successful missions in Afghanistan, shooting Soviet soldiers along the way. Another story, “Bakhtawara and Miriam” features women caught in the time of life of love and marriage, having to make the tough choices of who to marry and where that choice will take them. In “Occupational Hazards,” we follow a man who immigrates from Afghanistan to America, whose story is told through the different job descriptions from the various occupations he’s had over the decades.

All of these stories, and the rest in the collection, center Afghan and Afghan American protagonists whose lives have been deeply impacted by the war in Afghanistan. Whether it’s living through the violence of war themselves or being raised by someone who was, each character’s trajectory in life has been impacted by America’s War on Terror.

Kochai’s stories also carry a sense of the surreal or absurd. In “The Tale of Dully’s Reversion,” a student teacher turns into a monkey, and his mother takes him back to Afghanistan to pray to a saint so he might be turned back into a man. Characters make seemingly ridiculous decisions only to have even more absurd outcomes. But all of these events push the characters to new limits and move the stories forward.

It’s difficult to not become entranced by these tales, each more gripping than the last — I ended up reading them all in one sitting! So if you’re looking for  a must-read short story collection of 2022, this is it.