The Ravenous Muse: A Table of Dark and Comic Contents, a Bacchanal of Books

With The Ravenous Muse, Karen Elizabeth Gordon, the author of The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, has created a brilliant and witty collection of writing about food and literature. A highly original and macabre selection - with a strong Slavic/Balkan flavor - it's an often surreal look at the whimsical and even comical realm of the pleasures and displeasures of the table. Sometimes food plays a provocative role - the inspiration for something else or a spur to the process of creativity itself. In these pieces, everything from olives to toffee is used to evoke emotions, characters, or events. Whether it's Raymond Queneau on the flavors of a Paris bus, Turgenev on cleaning shoes with bread crumbs, Flann O'Brien on voracious bicycles, Julio Cortazar on artichokes and time, a midnight snack with Rossini, George Sand sleepwalking into breakfast, Balzac succumbing to the fatal attraction of his coffeepot, Milorad Pavic on bread, or Dickens describing the strangest dining table man has ever known - or become - the reader will be astonished to see food and its rituals in daring new ways.