Lara Vapnyar, born in Russia, first made her literary-emigre name with a collection of stories called There Are Jews in My House. Her third book, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, is a slender but rigorously concentrated one. It returns to that demanding--and I think, in our era, deeply undervalued--form. Each story is centered around food. In one, a Russian carpet installer, lonely for his wife back home, tries trading money for sex but finds the woman's borscht much more warming than her body. In another, before going back to join her boyfriend and her family at the table, a young woman goes out to look at the snow in Brooklyn: "I slowly take it in, the powdered cars, the timid light of lampposts, the naked twigs of the cherry trees."