About this item
"Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace. Unbeknownst to eleven-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promises of a good job and a rosy life. A shady company named Delicious Foods shuttles her to a remote farm, where she is held captive, performing hard labor in the fields to pay off the supposed debt for her food, lodging, and the constant stream of drugs the farm provides to her and the other unfortunates imprisoned there. In Delicious Foods, James Hannaham tells the gripping story of three unforgettable characters: a mother, her son, and the drug that threatens to destroy them. Through Darlene's haunted struggle to reunite with Eddie, through the efforts of both to triumph over those who would enslave them, and through the irreverent and mischievous voice of the drug that narrates Darlene's travails, Hannaham's daring and shape-shifting prose infuses this harrowing experience with grace and humor. The desperate circumstances that test the unshakeable bond between this mother and son unfold into myth, and Hannaham's treatment of their ordeal spills over with compassion. Along the way we experience a tale at once contemporary and historical that wrestles with timeless questions of love and freedom, forgiveness and redemption, tenacity and the will to survive"--
About the Author
James Hannaham is the author of the novel Delicious Foods, winner of the 2016 PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction, the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His first novel, God Says No, was published by McSweeney's in 2009 and was a finalist for a Lambda Book Award, a semifinalist for a VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and was named an honor book by the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Awards. His short fiction has appeared in BOMB, The Literary Review, Nerve. com, Open City, and several anthologies. He has written for the Village Voice, Spin, Blender, Out, Us, New York Magazine, The Barnes & Noble Review and The New York Times Magazine. Once upon a time in 2008, he was a staff writer at Salon. com. He has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and Fundación Valparaíso and a NYFFA Fellowship. He teaches in the Department of Writing at the Pratt Institute. In November 2021, Soft Skull published Pilot Impostor, a multi-genre book of responses to poems by Fernando Pessoa, and in 2022, Little, Brown will release his third novel, Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta.
