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Monique Truong
Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1968, Monique Truong is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), is the inaugural selection of the Ladies' Home Journal Book Club. The novel received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American... show more

Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1968, Monique Truong is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), is the inaugural selection of the Ladies' Home Journal Book Club. The novel received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a 25 Best Fiction Books of 2010 by Barnes & Noble, a 10 Best Fiction Books of 2010 by Hudson Booksellers, and the adult fiction Honor Book by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association.Her first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) was a national bestseller and the recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Award, an Association for Asian American Studies Poetry/Prose Award, and a Seventh Annual Asian American Literary Award. In 2003, The Book of Salt was honored as a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, a Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction Book, one of the Village Voice's 25 Favorite Books, and one of the Miami Herald's Top 10 Books, among other citations.Truong is also a contributing co-editor of Watermark: An Anthology of Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose (Asian American Writers' Workshop, 1998). Truong writes a monthly online food column entitled "Ravenous" for the New York Times' T Magazine. She has contributed to Real Simple, Town & Country, Condé Nast Traveler, Allure, Saveur, Food & Wine, Gourmet, the Times of London (Saturday Magazine), Time Magazine (Asia edition), and other publications.Truong was a PEN/Robert Bingham Fellow, a Princeton University's Hodder Fellow, and is now a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow.Truong is also an intellectual property attorney, but she hopes that you will not hold that against her. When she is not writing, which is most of the time, she cooks and takes naps. She lacks many basic life skills such as knowing how to drive a car, ride a bicycle, or read a map. She has been known to walk long distances, though, especially if there is a very good bakery located at the end of that walk.
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Portable Magic
Portable Magic rated it 5 years ago
I'm not sure why the author chose to make the famous real-life couple of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas important secondary characters in this book about a Vietnamese cook. It really only served as a distraction, when she could easily have used a fictional couple. There was a lot about this bo...
EpicFehlReader
EpicFehlReader rated it 10 years ago
“What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two” are the prophetic last words that Linda Hammerick’s grandmother says to her. Growing up in small-town North Carolina in the 1970s and ’80s, Linda already knows that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of h...
elisas8
elisas8 rated it 12 years ago
this is a hard one for me to rate. for some reason i had *extremely* low expectations going in, and i'm sure that affected my reading of this book for at least the first 75 pages or so. i did think that this was not easy to get into, to care at all about, and i really had to work on focusing on ac...
calisoleil
calisoleil rated it 14 years ago
3 and a half stars.
Between The Bookends
Between The Bookends rated it 14 years ago
Really Really enjoyed this one!
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