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Summary
Summary
"[A] culinary combo plate of Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Julian Schnabel, and Sam Peckinpah . . . Harrison writes with enough force to make your knees buckle and with infectious zeal that makes you turn the pages hungry for more . . . Jim Harrison has staked out a distinctive place in the world of food writing."--Jane and Michael Stern, New York Times Book Review on The Raw and the Cooked
New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison was one of this country's most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. He also wrote some of the best essays on food around, earning praise as "the poet laureate of appetite" ( Dallas Morning News ). A Really Big Lunch , to be published on the one-year anniversary of Harrison's death, collects many of his food pieces for the first time--and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve.
Jim Harrison's legendary gourmandise is on full display in A Really Big Lunch . From the titular New Yorker piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from Brick , Playboy , Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews, A Really Big Lunch is shot through with Harrison's pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison's life over the last three decades. A Really Big Lunch is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.
"Harrison is the American Rabelais, and he is at his irreverent and excessive best in this collection." --John Skowles, San Diego Union-Tribune on The Raw and the Cooked
Author Notes
Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was the New York Times -bestselling author of thirty-nine previous books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including Legends of the Fall , Dalva , and Returning to Earth . A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, his work was published in twenty-seven languages.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The late poet and novelist Harrison (Legends of the Fall), known for sagas of frontier existentialists, was also a devotee of fine and not-so-fine dining, and his gusto sparkles throughout this collection of magazine essays on food. Harrison writes of a vast range of meals and foodstuffs in disparate settings: fresh-caught rattlesnakes; a dinner of "artisanal salamis, lamb and duck prosciutto" flown in for a fishing trip; innumerable sojourns through France eating at bistros and ogling women; the title feast, an 11-hour, 37-course, 19-wine lunch featuring three centuries of French delicacies including poached eel with chicken wing tips and testicles in a pool of tarragon butter. Woven around the food descriptions (complete with a recipe for bear-meat cubes) are the author's rambling ruminations and poems on just about everything, including the similarities of wine criticism and literary criticism, Wall Street's odiousness, Buddhist moral lacunae, and death and dying. As his aging body succumbs to diabetes, shingles, kidney stones, and other afflictions, food becomes a last redoubt of sensual pleasure amid waning physicality. Harrison treats all these subjects with his usual earthy wit and delighted curiosity; the result is a tasty nosh for foodies with a literary bent. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A celebration of eating well and drinking even better as a recipe for the good life.This posthumous collection of food pieces (very broadly defined) by the award-winning novelist serves as a sequel of sorts to The Raw and the Cooked (2001), which documented his insatiable hunger for food, from the mundane to the exotic to the exquisite, and so much more. The linchpin of a collection that holds together surprisingly well is the title piece that he wrote for the New Yorker in 2004, an essay that scandalized some readers in its embrace of excess. "Is there an interior logic to overeating, or does gluttony, like sex, wander around in a messy void, utterly resistant to our attempts to make sense of it?" he wonders. "Not very deep within us, the hungry heart howls, Supersize me!' " Some of the other essays also reference this piece, in its vivid description of its 37 courses, along with his ironic complaint that only 19 wines accompanied it. He later writes, "I have often thought that if I received an early warning that I would pass on sooner than later, I'd get myself to Lyon and eat for a solid month, after which they could tip me from a gurney into the blessed Rhone. Maybe I'd swim all the way downstream to Arles for my last supper." In the latter half of the collection, Harrison proceeds through just the kind of extended warning that the author had suggested, with the thoughts on the way he has lived his life underscored by the ravages he is experiencing. Along the way, the author waxes wickedly funny over matters of art, politics, spirituality, sex, and the commingling of all of them. His advice: "Your meals in life are numbered and the number is diminishing. Get at it." If this is the last we get from Harrison, it serves as a fitting memorial. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Poet and novelist Harrison's food writing was previously collected in The Raw and the Cooked (2001), and most of the nearly 50 pieces gathered in this new collection, published on the one-year anniversary of the author's death, were written since then. First appearing in Brick, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, and other publications, the mostly short essays share a stream-of-consciousness, unedited, uncensored approach and touch on travel, politics, literature, art, sex, writing, and the author's health nearly as much as they do food. And on all of the above, his playful quotability is boundless: tofu is a gustatory self-laceration, drinking is the writer's black lung disease, and if you shared a bottle of Cayron before the usual obnoxious meeting you wouldn't hate anyone. Battling painful illness, he writes, Of course we are loaned this life, then suddenly one day it's overdue. With an introduction from Harrison's longtime friend Mario Batali, this makes a great addition to popular food and wine collections and will be a savory treat for Harrison fans.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. ix |
| Eat Your Heart Out (Smoke Signals, 1981) | p. 1 |
| Food for Thought (Smoke Signals, 1982) | p. 4 |
| The Dead Food Scrolls (Smoke Signals, 1983) | p. 9 |
| The Vivid Diet (Unpublished, 1986) | p. 14 |
| Father-in-Law (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 1995) | p. 22 |
| Wine Notes (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2002) | p. 24 |
| Is Winemaking an Art? (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2002) | p. 28 |
| My Problems with White Wine (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2002) | p. 31 |
| Eat or Die (Brick, 2003) | p. 35 |
| Paris Rebellion (Brick, 2003) | p. 39 |
| Odious Comparisons (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2004) | p. 44 |
| Wine Criticism and Literary Criticism (Part II) (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2004) | p. 47 |
| Food, Sex, and Death (Brick, 2004) | p. 52 |
| A Really Big Lunch (New Yorker, 2004) | p. 58 |
| Carte | p. 69 |
| Tongue (Brick, 2004) | p. 82 |
| Ducks (Motto Italiano, 2005) | p. 88 |
| Wine Strategies (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2005) | p. 91 |
| Resuming the Pleasure (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2005) | p. 95 |
| Snake-Eating (Brick, 2005) | p. 100 |
| Bear Posole (The Montana Writers' Cookbook, 2005) | p. 106 |
| Food, Fitness, and Death (Brick, 2005) | p. 107 |
| The Fisherman Gourmand (Big Sky Cooking, 2006) | p. 113 |
| Food and Mood (Brick, 2006) | p. 116 |
| Vin Blanc (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2006) | p. 122 |
| Eternity and Food (Brick, 2006) | p. 128 |
| The Spirit of Wine (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2007) | p. 135 |
| Here I Stand for a Few Minutes (Brick, 2007) | p. 141 |
| One Good Thing Leads to Another (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2007) | p. 147 |
| Don't Go Out Over Your Head (Brick, 2007) | p. 151 |
| Rage and Appetite (Brick, 2008) | p. 158 |
| Close to the Bone (Martha Stewart Living, 2008) | p. 166 |
| Food, Finance, and Spirit (Brick, 2009) | p. 169 |
| The Body Is a Temple (Brick, 2009) | p. 176 |
| Food and Music (Brick, 2010) | p. 183 |
| The Arts Versus Food and Birds (Brick, 2010) | p. 191 |
| Wine and Poetry (Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, 2010) | p. 201 |
| Caregiver (Brick, 2011) | p. 207 |
| Chef English Major (Playboy, June 2011) | p. 216 |
| The Logic of Birds and Fishes As It Relates to Shingles (Brick, 2011) | p. 223 |
| Pain (Brick, 2012) | p. 229 |
| Courage and Survival (Brick, 2013) | p. 236 |
| San Rafael (Brick, 2013) | p. 243 |
| Eat Where You Live (Edible Baja Arizona, 2014) | p. 250 |
| Gramps le Fou (Brick 2014) | p. 252 |
| Truly Older (Brick, 2014) | p. 262 |
| Real Old Food (Brick, 2015) | p. 267 |
| Everyday Life: The Question of Zen (Brick, 2001) | p. 272 |
| Photo Credits | p. 276 |