Mayukh Sen

Adored by battalions of devotees and maligned by others for melodramatic twists and turns, soap operas have had an outsized impact on culture, prefiguring the rise of today’s reality television and character-driven prestige dramas. In Love in the Afternoon... and Evening, cultural critics Charlotte Druckman and Mayukh Sen salute the stories and talent that have sustained the industry since its radio days. Featured are interviews with soap icons; deep dives into the genre’s infamous tropes and archetypes; and considered takes on the industry’s treatment of race, reproductive rights and queerness. Part cultural analysis, part backstage tour and all love letter to an oft–misunderstood art form, Love in the Afternoon... and Evening will make you want to bust out of your shoulder pads and binge-watch your favourite show all over again. A Paperback Original Mayukh Sen’s Love, Queenie was praised as: “Extraordinary." —The New York Times Book Review "[Love, Queenie] is one of the best film-related biographies I’ve read." —Brian McFarlane, The Sydney Morning Herald

Merle Oberon attained Hollywood immortality with a nomination for a Best Leading Actress Oscar for her role in the 1935 film The Dark Angel. It was the first time a performer of colour had received an acting nomination at the Academy Awards but because Oberon concealed her South Asian identity throughout her lifetime and “passed” for white, very few people knew it. In Love, Queenie, Mayukh Sen draws on family interviews and previously untapped archival research to animate the Wuthering Heights star’s hard-won journey to fame. From an upbringing in poverty, she rose to the highest echelons of the film-world elite during Hollywood’s racially exclusionary Golden Age. Love, Queenie empathetically captures one woman’s story while illuminating truths on race, gender and power that still resonate today.

Merle Oberon attained Hollywood immortality with a nomination for a Best Leading Actress Oscar for her role in the 1935 film The Dark Angel. It was the first time a performer of colour had received an acting nomination at the Academy Awards but because Oberon concealed her South Asian identity throughout her lifetime and “passed” for white, very few people knew it. In Love, Queenie, the first biography in more than forty years of the India-born actress, Mayukh Sen draws on family interviews and previously untapped archival research to animate the Wuthering Heights star’s hard-won journey to fame. From an upbringing in poverty, she rose to the highest echelons of the film-world elite during Hollywood’s racially exclusionary Golden Age. A major biography of an often-overlooked talent, Love, Queenie empathetically captures one woman’s story while illuminating truths on race, gender and power that still resonate today.

Who’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honours seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from the Second World War to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes. In imaginative, lively prose, Mayukh Sen—a queer, brown child of immigrants—reconstructs the lives of these women in vivid and empathetic detail, daring to ask why some were famous in their own time but not in ours and why others shine brightly even today.

Who’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honours seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from the Second World War to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes. In imaginative, lively prose, Mayukh Sen—a queer, brown child of immigrants—reconstructs the lives of these women in vivid and empathetic detail, daring to ask why some were famous in their own time but not in ours and why others shine brightly even today. Weaving together histories of food, immigration and gender, Taste Makers challenges the way readers look at what’s on their plate—and the women whose labour, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible.

An original collection of personal essays blending food writing and memoir, and exploring subjects ranging from the significance of Chers hors doeuvres in the film Mermaids, to the way in which food can become a language we use to communicate things that are too difficult to say, via a history of cookbooks that have their foundations in grieving and loss, and one writers experience of the six kitchens shes made her own over the years.Funny, astute and thought provoking, In the Kitchen explores the importance of food in and out of the kitchen.