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Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

DELICIOUS FOODS

James Hannaham

"James Hannaham's new novel is a tour de force. Gripping, haunting, and deeply moving, it beguiles the reader with the urgent immediacy of its characters' lives, while also reverberating with universal themes of freedom and enslavement, love and survival." - Jennifer Egan

Darlene, a young widow and mother devastated by the death of her husband, turns to drugs to erase the trauma. In this fog of grief, she is lured with the promise of a great job to a mysterious farm run by a shady company, with disastrous consequences for both her and her eleven-year-old son, Eddie--left behind in a panic-stricken search for her.

DELICIOUS FOODS tells the gripping story of three unforgettable characters: a mother, her son, and the drug that threatens to destroy them. In Darlene's haunted struggle to reunite with Eddie, and in the efforts of both to triumph over those who would enslave them, Hannaham's daring and shape-shifting prose not only infuses their desperate circusmtances with grace and humor, but also wrestles with timeless questions of love and freedom.

James Hannaham is the author of the novel God Says No, which was honored by the American Library Association. He holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and lives in Brooklyn, where he teaches creative writing at the Pratt Institute.
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Published 2015-03-01 by Back Bay Books (Little, Brown)

Comments

An eye-opening, standout novel. (starred review)

Hannaham's seductive and disturbing second novel grips the reader from page one. (starred review)

DELICIOUS FOODS is a strange and compelling American horror story, arrived at through fresh narrative strategies. A mother, a son, drugs, workers enslaved in a gruesome nightmare, love and survival—this is a wonderfully conjured novel. - Daniel Woodrell

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Read more...

Best Books 2015: Hannaham's novel is both inventive (one of the main narrators is Scotty, the literal personification of crack) and terrifying: the mysterious titular farm, located somewhere in the American South, will leave readers shaken. But at its heart, this is the story of a mother and her son, and of overcoming addiction and pain with forgiveness and love.

Don't let the appealing title fool you. This searing novel tackles death and big food corporations. Also, it's partly narrated by crack cocaine. Yep. (20 Books We'll Read in 2015) Read more...

Netherlands: Querido

A] sensational new novel about the tenacity of racism and its bizarre permutations. / / This is, for all its weirdness, an archetypal tale of American struggle. / / [a] fantastically creative performance you will devour this book.

Bury me with this book, so I will remember how wonderful living was—the food, the words, the stories, the places, the feeling of freedom. Delicious Foods is a magnificent novel, full of the beauty a great writer can make of even the most terrifying parts of life. - Rebecca Lee

textured, inventive and provocatively funny (starred review)

Kirkus Best Fiction Books 2015 Read more...

James Hannaham's new novel is a tour de force. Gripping, haunting, and deeply moving, it beguiles the reader with the urgent immediacy of its characters' lives, while also reverberating with universal themes of freedom and enslavement, love and survival. - Jennifer Egan

Italy: Rizzoli; Portugal: Relogio d'Agua

If The Great Gatsby was the Great American Novel of the twentieth century, Delicious Foods could be that of the early twenty-first. / / If the plot sounds like tough going, Hannaham's masterpiece is anything but. The writing makes it ‘great,' and the themes of pain, forgiveness, exploitation, and self-creation make it American. It is simply unmissable. (starred review)

This is a book of astonishing originality and power. In Delicious Foods, James Hannaham has created a wholly new world—a hallucinatory place shot through with struggle and terrible deeds—but one never lacking light or hope. Hannaham reinvents the Southern gothic with prose at once brutal and lyrical and drop-dead gorgeous. This is a hell of a novel. - Dave Eggers