The Devil's Larder - Hardcover

In The Devil's Larder, Jim Crace has put together an odd and artful little volume that encompasses more of the human experience than it really ought to, given its size and scope. Crace presents us with 64 short fictions about food, which add up to a picture of life that is at once diabolical and innocent, creepily sexualized and free of judgment. In one fable, a mother and her small daughter twist their tongues together, ferreting out the food in each other's mouths: they want to know if food tastes the same from another person's tongue. A game of strip fondue ends with guests covered in burns where the molten cheese has fallen onto their naked flesh. "A gasp of pain. The whiff of sizzling flesh and hair and cheese." Flesh and cheese, that's the stuff. Crace shows us the odd outer limits of desire, and revels in the sheer weirdness of the daily act of eating. --Claire Dederer

Jim Crace is the author, most recently, of Quarantine, which won the 1997 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Being Dead, which was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2000. His novels have been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Birmingham, England.