In C Pam Zhang‘s Land of Milk and Honey, a smog has spread across the world, blocking out the sun. 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 the conversation, moderated by novelist Ayşegül Savaş, Zhang will explore the themes of pleasure, food, and identity, offering insights into the novel’s exploration of human desire and survival in the face of societal upheaval.
About the speaker:
C Pam Zhang is the author of two bestselling novels, How Much of These Hills Is Gold and Land of Milk and Honey. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, a Booker Prize nominee, and the winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature, and the California Book Award. She has been a finalist for awards from PEN America, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Center for Fiction. Zhang’s writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She is a 2024-25 American Library in Paris Visiting Fellow.
Ayşegül Savaş is the author of the novels Walking on the Ceiling, White on White, and most recently The Anthropologists which was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named one of TIME magazine‘s top 10 books of 2024, New York Magazine‘s #1 book of the year, and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, among others. Savaş has also written the nonfiction work The Wilderness, and the short story collection Long Distance which will be published this year.
