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

Literature and food go well together, as this groaning board of quotes and comical anecdotes, an exotic menu of reading and eating, leads us from Apollinaire to Wittgenstein.

I was wondering about the influx of writing coming out of Sacramento, so I decided to investigate its two foremost writers. I took one glance at this new fancy book by Karen Gordon and said to myself "where's the paprika," or "where's Rosemary Furfaro?" It turns out that this cookbook-looking event and delicacy was directed to the right person. Gordon has created Gothic language handbooks in the past (which happen to be one of my favorite periods of literature). She has also recently released the fairytale spin-off, The Red Shoes, with its intricate and infinite connections. Another book by her is to be released later this year. I say move over Vollmann, here we have a fervent producer of quantity the like style of a Japanese garden. Yet The Ravenous Muse carefully explores the theme of food in the great corpus of literature. We are talking about quotations from writers that even the snobs don't know about: Andrei Bely, Elias Canetti, René Char, Eduardo Galeano, Witold Gombrowicz, José Lima, Flann O'Brien, Frederic Prokosch, and Raymond Queneau. Queneau may be the most important in terms of Gordon's esthetic because they share a certain intangible quality that makes their books emanate a rare original flame.

A wide-ranging collection of literary quotes featuring food, this is a wonderful gift book for literary and gustatory gourmands! From the abstract and brief ("Toasted Susie is my ice cream."-Gertrude Stein) to the Flann O' Brien's complex and lengthy description of foods used as bribery: "...promised him metheglin and mugs of viscous tar-black mead...corn-coarse nourishing farls of wheaten bread dipped in musk-scented liquors and sodden with Belgian sherry" --this goes on and on!) to a bowl of porridge that "gave an "ominous, leering heave (Stella Gibbons' "Cold Comfort Farm"), this is a delight, especially for avid readers.Some selections are a line or a paragraph; others extend to a few pages. Ms. Gordon also includes anecdotes and her own comments on some of the excerpts. There is no discernable order to the (mostly non-American) authors sampled in this 248-page book, but there is a very useful index and brief biographies of each author--including recommendations of other fare that you might enjoy. Recommended!!