C Pam Zhang has stunned audiences with her rapturous and revelatory storytelling in her acclaimed bestselling novel Land of Milk and Honey. Sensuous and surprising, Zhang’s prose lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world even as it remains a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.
Q&A with Daniel Tam-Claiborne.
In a community for the superrich minority in the Italian Alps, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. The unnamed protagonist’s 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 this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate in a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive.
C Pam Zhang is the author of two bestselling novels, How Much of These Hills Is Gold and Land of Milk and Honey. She 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.
Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he has also received support from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Kundiman, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and others. Daniel holds degrees from Oberlin College, Yale University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His debut novel, Transplants, was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and is forthcoming from Regalo Press (Simon & Schuster) in 2025.
