Sustenance and Desire: A Food Lover's Anthology of Sensuality and Humor

Sustenance and Desire is a wonderful book to savor by yourself and to give as a gift. Bascove's paintings are luminous, haunting, sensual, and fascinating. Nick and Cinnamon, p 208, is an incredible portrait of a boy with a bird, and the paintings of tomatoes, artichokes and peaches are lush, inspired and yes, erotic! Bascove also gathered a rich variety of poems and prose pieces that range from Jhumpa Lahiri on spices to Nabokov on mushrooms to Proust on madeleines and memory (how many of us have actually read that passage?). There are articles about aphrodisiacs and vegetarianism and cannibalism (!) as well as Barbara Ehrenreich's take on waitressing for tiny tips. Basho, Woolf, Kimic, Milosz, Kingsolver, Oates, Langston Hughes... It's as if Bascove threw a dinner party for the ages, and everyone came dressed in different styles and offering different treats. It's a smorgasbord you'll love and I offer you this taste, a short poem by Les Murray (p 9): "A fact the gourmet euphemism can't silence: vegetarians eat sex, carnivores eat violence."