Beautiful Fruits Format: Paperback

Food can bring together families, communities, and cultures. It is the essence of life and yet our relationships with one another can be most fraught at the dinner table. This perpetually fascinating subject has inspired a unique collection of fiction—including flash fiction, essay, short stories, and even a "stoku" (amalgam of short story and haiku)—from a wonderfully diverse and international group of authors.

The authors in the anthology include Elaine Chiew, Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni, Rachel J. Fenton, Diana Ferraro, Vanessa Gebbie, Pippa Goldschmidt, Sue Guiney, Patrick J. Holland, Roy Kesey, Charles Lambert, Krys Lee, Stefani Nellen, Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Ben Okri, Angie Pelekidis, Susannah Rickards, and Nikesh Shukla.

Elaine Chiew is a London-based writer who has won several prizes for her short stories and flash fiction. She was included in One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories. Many of her stories revolve around food.

Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author, poet, activist, and teacher of writing. She has been published in many magazines and her writing has been included in over fifty anthologies.

Ben Okri has published eight novels, including The Famished Road and Starbook, as well as collections of poetry, short stories, and essays. He has won numerous international prizes.

Pippa Goldschmidt writes long and short fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Her PhD in astronomy inspired her first novel The Falling Sky, about a female astronomer who discovers the Universe and loses her mind.

Elaine Chiew is a London-based fiction writer. Prizes include the 2008 Bridport Short Story Competition; the 2010 Bridge-the-Gap Camera Obscura flash fiction competition. She has a completed a short story collection and a novel calledGirl Through a Sieve (about cooking and hip hop) and is working on a new novel about ramen.

Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author, poet, activist and teacher of writing. She has been published in over 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 50 anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories.

Pippa Goldschmidt writes long and short fiction, poetry and non-fiction. She has a PhD in Astronomy and her novelThe Falling Sky, about a female astronomer who discovers the Universe and loses her mind, was one of three finalists for the Dundee International Book Prize 2012. She was winner of a Scottish Book Trust/Creative Scotland New Writers Award for 2011/2012. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in a wide variety of publications including Gutter, New Writing Scotland, The Scotsman and anthologies such asWhere Rockets Burn Through: Contemporary Science Fiction Poetry from the UK.

Roy Kesey's latest book is a short story collection called Any Deadly Thing. He’s the author of a novel calledPacazo, a collection of short stories calledAll Over (a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, and one of The L Magazine's Best Books of the Decade), a novella calledNothing in the World (winner of the Bullfight Media Little Book Award), and a historical guide to the city of Nanjing, China. He has appeared in several anthologies including Best American Short Stories, New Sudden Fiction, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and The Future Dictionary of America, and in more than eighty magazines including McSweeney's, Subtropics, The Georgia Review, American Short Fiction, The Iowa Review and Ninth Letter.

Ben Okri has published 8 novels, including The Famished Road and Starbook, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded the OBE as well as numerous international prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore.

Charles Lambert is a novelist and stort story writer. He has written two novels,Little Monsters andAny Human Face. The title story of his collectionThe Scent of Cinnamon and Other Stories won O. Henry Prize Stories in 2007.

Rachel Fenton is a writer and artist based in New Zealand. She has been published in various publications, includingThe Stinging Fly Magazine andFrench Literary Review. Rachel has also won three literary prizes, including the most recent "Short FICTION 7th Annual Competition" in association with the University of Plymouth (2013).

Diana Ferraro is a bilingual Argentine writer. She began publishing her novels, short stories, and political essays in Spanish in 1983. Now, she is the author of two collections of short stories,The Map of Solitude andThe Bells, and a novel, The French Lesson written in English.

Vanessa Gebbie became a writer in 2002, and after working very hard learned to write short stories and flash fiction. She is now the author ofStorm Warning andThe Coward’s Tale.

Sue Guiney is a novelist, poet, and educator based currently in London. Sue has five published works including,Out of the Ruins andA Clash of Innocents. She describes herself as 'a writer and teacher of fiction, poetry, plays with special interests in Cambodia, violin, physics and medicin