When My Year of Meats first appeared in 1998,
critical response was generally enthusiastic. In one
positive review in the Chicago Tribune, Jane Smiley
praised Ozeki for creating “a comical-satirical-far-
cical-epical-tragical-romantical novel.” And one
Newsweek reviewer promised that My Year of Meats
would leave readers “hungry for whatever Ozeki
cooks up next.” While Lise Funderburg suggested
in her review for the New York Times, that Ozeki’s
message occasionally threatens to overshadow her
fiction, the novel’s merging of politics and fiction
has brought it to the attention of literary scholars,
leading to the publication of several recent critical
essays that consider the novel’s engagement with
current topics such as globalization, transnational-
ism, and performativity.
Bibliography
Black, Shameem. “Fertile Cosmofeminism: Ruth L.
Ozeki and Transnational Reproduction.” Merid-
ians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 5 (2004):
226–256.
Chiu, Monica. “Postnational Globalization and
(En)Gendered Meat Production in Ruth L. Oze-
ki’s My Year of Meats.” Lit: Literature, Interpreta-
tion, Theory 12 (April 2001): 99–128.
Cornyetz, Nina. “The Meat Manifesto: Ruth Ozeki’s
Performative Poetics.” Women and Performance: A
Journal of Feminist Theory 12 (2001): 207–224.
Rachel Ihara206 My Year of Meats