Malaprop's celebrates NC heritage food, explores life behind border walls

This page is provided exclusively to Scene each week by staffers at Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe, 55 Haywood St., Asheville. To learn more, call 828-254-6734 or visit malaprops.com. The events described here are free.

Behind the border walls

Imagine a world where The Wall is built. Imagine walls sealing our border to the north and to the south, closing us off from the rest of the world. Imagine how America would stagnate and suffer as we became recluses in our fear. Imagine our country run by a sinister board of unseen individuals who monitored our lives through ID chips, cameras, and drones. Imagine an America so closed off that anyone with a dissenting voice was called a terrorist and immediately taken into custody.

Jacqui Castle’s young adult debut novel "The Seclusion" creates just such a world. Set in a future where “freedom” means having the ever-watchful eye of the Compliance Department in your home, your car, your city.    

Castle perfectly captures the dread and anxiety of living in a police state, as we follow Patricia “Patch” Collins navigating a desolate American landscape destroyed by chemicals and war and come to realize how easy it is to become complacent about censorship.

Spoiler: The moment when Patch discovers books written before America’s fall is particularly powerful and moving.  

Mike Rich, Hollywood screenwriter and YA author of "Skavenger’s" Hunt has praised Castle’s novel as setting "the hook in a wickedly quick heartbeat — not only by her words, but also by the words we hear in the news and social media every day.”

Castle presents "The Seclusion" at Malaprop’s at 6 p.m. Sept. 4. —Katie Brown, Bookseller

NC's heritage foods

I’ve never read anything like it. Consider September, for example, Chapter Nine: Scuppernongs. As in the muscadine that grows along the Scuppernong River near Columbia, North Carolina, the official state fruit, renown for its medicinal properties and harvested in September.

Georgann Eubanks has a whole chapter on scuppernongs in her new book, "The Month of Their Ripening: North Carolina Heritage Foods Through the Year." There are chapters on apples, figs, cantaloupes, serviceberries, soft-shell crabs, ramps and persimmons too.

All these foods and more are organized by month, resulting in a book that is equal parts food essay, regional travelogue, natural history and profile of the characters that cultivate the foods that define the state.

Eubanks’ book studies these foods in order to “elaborate our collective story — past and present — as people of many tastes and habits,” as she declares in her preface.

We seem to be emerging into a period of cultural rediscovery, of renewed interest in traditional agrarian forms and a suspicion of unnecessary complications. Eubanks’ study of food participates in that trend, simultaneously imploring readers to patiently delay indulgence until foods are in their peak season and encouraging us to experiment with new methods of cultivation and culinary preparation.

Eubanks will present "The Month of Their Ripening" at Malaprop’s at 4 p.m. Sept. 1, which also so happens to be her birthday. Come join the celebration and learn about the foods that make North Carolina. —Ryan Matthews, Bookseller