Thursday, November 21, 2019

Top ten books about vegetarians

Binnie Kirshenbaum is a novelist and short story writer. She has twice won the Critic's Choice Award and the Discovery Award. She was one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists and one of Paper magazine's Beautiful People. Her books have been selected as Favorite Books of the Year by The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, Vogue and National Public Radio. Her work has been translated into seven languages. She is a professor and Fiction Director at Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts.

Kirshenbaum's latest novel is Rabbits for Food.

At the Guardian, she tagged ten great books about vegetarians, including:
Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee

Coetzee’s eponymous character is a brilliant writer, a highly opinionated literary celebrity, a complicated woman and an avowed vegetarian. The novel is structured around a series of formal lectures, some of which are on animal rights. A person of focused concerns, she doesn’t always have room for sensitivities beyond that sphere. At one lecture, Elizabeth compares the treatment of cattle to Nazi atrocities. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t go over well with the audience, or with her son – who implores her to quit making a spectacle of herself.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue