Hungry For You: From Cannibalism to Seduction - A Book of Food

Description

In HUNGRY FOR YOU, Joan Smith turns her attention to this infinitely intriguing. A collection of her own sharp, funny and stimulating essays on our attitudes to food and eating is accompanied and amplified by a fascinating selection of extracts from novels, tracts, songs, self-help books, poetry and biography. Her essays look at cannibalism and the strange imagination of the man-eating serial killers; at the politics of starvation and anorexia; at sexual 'appetite'; at taboos, and the connection between the stricture of Leviticus and the regimes of Rosemary Conley. Each essay is followed by a series of extracts- from Piers Paul Read's chilling account of cannibalism to Nora Ephron on the comforts of mashed potatoes; from the Princess of Wales talking about bulimia to Proust's voluptuous appreciation of the shape and colour of asparagus, and gems from Catullus, Madonna, Swift, Brian Keenan, Freud, and Lorrie.

Joan Smith is a novelist, journalist and critic. She is the author of the highly acclaimed Misogynies and several detective novels, two of which have been filmed by BBC television.