Friday, January 31, 2014

Pig Candy

From Amazon.com

Pig Candy is the poignant and often comical story of a grown daughter getting to know her dying father in his last months. During a series of visits with her father to the South he'd escaped as a young black man, Lise Funderburg, the mixed-race author of the acclaimed Black, White, Other, comes to understand his rich and difficult background and the conflicting choices he has had to make throughout his life.

Lise Funderburg is a child of the '60s, a white-looking mixed-race girl raised in an integrated Philadelphia neighborhood. As a child, she couldn't imagine what had made her father so strict, demanding, and elusive; about his past she knew only that he had grown up in the Jim Crow South and fled its brutal oppression as a young man. Then, just as she hits her forties, her father is diagnosed with advanced and terminal cancer -- an event that leads father and daughter together on a stream of pilgrimages to his hometown in rural Jasper County, Georgia. As her father's escort, proxy, and, finally, nurse, Funderburg encounters for the first time the fragrant landscape and fraught society -- and the extraordinary food -- of his childhood.

In succulent, evocative, and sometimes tart prose, the author brings to life a fading rural South of pecan groves, family-run farms, and pork-laden country cuisine. She chronicles small-town relationships that span generations, the dismantling of her own assumptions about when race does and doesn't matter, and the quiet segregation that persists to this day. As Funderburg discovers the place and people her father comes from, she also, finally, gets to know her magnetic, idiosyncratic father himself. Her account of their thorny but increasingly close relationship is full of warmth, humor, and disarming candor. In one of his last grand actsFunderburg's father recruits his children, neighbors, and friends to throw a pig roast -- an unforgettable meal that caps an unforgettable portrait of a man enjoying his life and loved ones right up through his final days.

Pig Candy takes readers on a stunning journey that becomes a universal investigation of identity and a celebration of the human will, familial love, and, ultimately, life itself.

http://www.amazon.com/Pig-Candy-Taking-Father-Memoir/dp/1416547673

Huffingpost and AARP Memoir Contest

From GalleyCat;

The AARP and The Huffington Post have teamed up for a writing contest. The two organizations are calling for memoirs as part of their new Memoir Contest.
The winner will get a $5,000 prize will be excerpted in AARP The Magazine and featured on The Huffington Post’s website. In addition, Simon & Schuster will consider publishing the work.  The first 5,000 words of the memoir is due February 15, 2014. Finalists from this round are invited to submit their complete memoir by June 15th. The books should run between 20,000 to 50,000 words.
To enter the contest, you have to have been born before Dec. 31, 1964. Here is more about eligibility from the rules:
The AARP & Huff/Post50 Memoir Contest (the “Contest”) is open only to legal residents of the fifty (50) United States (including the District of Columbia) who were born before Dec. 31, 1964. Employees, contractors, and their immediate families (spouse, parents, children, siblings, and their respective spouses), including those living in the employees’ households of AOL Inc., AARP, Simon & Schuster, Inc. (“S&S”), and their respective parent companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, divisions, advertising and promotion agencies (collectively, the “Contest Entities”), are not eligible to enter or win a Prize.

Eddie Huang's Memoir to Be a TV Show

ABC is shooting a pilot of Eddie Huang's memoir Fresh off the Boat. Huang himself is the producer and Nahnatchka Khan will be both scriptwriter and executive producer. The tv show will be about a Chinese family that settles in Orlando, Florida in the 1990s.