Overview
It starts with a gift, when Ben Ryder Howe's wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents' self-sacrifice by buying them a store. Howe, an editor at the rarefied Paris Review, agrees to go along. Things soon become a lot more complicated. After the business struggles, Howe finds himself living in the basement of his in-laws' Staten Island home, commuting to the Paris Review offices in George Plimpton's Upper East Side townhouse by day, and heading to Brooklyn at night to slice cold cuts and peddle lottery tickets. ""My Korean Deli"" follows the store's tumultuous life span, and along the way paints the portrait of an extremely unlikely partnership between characters with shoots across society, from the Brooklyn streets to Seoul to Puritan New England. Owning the deli becomes a transformative experience for everyone involved as they struggle to salvage the original gift - and the family - while sorting out issues of values, work, and identity.
Full Product Details
Author: Ben Ryder Howe
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Inc
Imprint: Henry Holt & Company Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 2.70cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.426kg
ISBN: 9780805093438
ISBN 10: 0805093435
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 01 March 2011
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Out of Print
Availability: In Print
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.
Reviews
<p> In this WASP-out-of-water tale of a Paris Review editor moonlighting as deli owner--or is it the other way around?--Howe plunges boldly into life’s ultimate mysteries: marriage, money, cohabitation with in-laws, the yin-yang currents of striving and slacking, and--perhaps the biggest mystery of them all--why the store can be empty of customers for hours and hours, and then twenty show up at once. Read this book, and you’ll come away wiser not just in the ways of the world, but of the human heart as well. --Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara <p> <p> My Korean Deli is about a Korean deli, as I expected. But it's also about love, culture-clashes, family, money and literature. Plus, it happens to be very funny and poignant. So buy a Slim Jim and a Vitamin water and sit down to enjoy it. --A.J. Jacobs, author of The Know It All and The Year of Living Biblically <p> I don’t know how else to explain My Korean Deli except to say that Ben
Author Information
Ben Ryder Howe has written for ""The New Yorker,"" ""The Atlantic Monthly,"" and ""Outside,"" and his work has been selected for ""Best American Travel Writing."" He is a former senior editor of ""The Paris Review."" He, his wife, and their two children live on Staten Island."" My Korean Deli"" is his first book.
