Three books that concern food but aren't in love with food

Jessica Soffer earned her MFA at Hunter College. Her work has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, and Vogue, among other publications. She teaches fiction at Connecticut College and lives in New York City.

Soffer's new novel, her debut, is Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots.

For NPR she tagged three books that concern food but aren't in love with food, including:

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

Rose Edelstein has a very strange superpower: She can taste emotion. In her mother's lemon cake: sadness. In her father's pudding: distraction. In butter, she can taste the weariness of a dairy farmer in Wisconsin. In this way, she discovers the secret emotions of the world, but more immediately, more heartbreakingly, the deepest, darkest wells of pain of her family members. In order to just sustain herself — and not feel too much — poor Rose must resort to consuming factory-produced foods: the most absent, anonymous, nonthreatening things she can find. Eating, in this wonderful novel, is not an exercise in joy, or intimacy, or beauty — or even a means toward nourishment. It is nothing so benign.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake was one of Janice Kaplan's twelve best fiction titles of the summer, 2010.

Visit Jessica Soffer's website and learn about ten of her favorite endings in books.

Writers Read: Jessica Soffer.

My Book, The Movie: Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots.

--Marshal Zeringue