In the tradition of T. C. Boyle, Steven Millhauser, and Michel Faber -- with a penchant for the macabre worthy of Irvine Welsh -- comes Eating Mammals.
Gypsies, businessmen, servants, masters, and unwise children come together in three mythical tales from Victorian England. Eating Mammals evokes a lost time and place in which the realm of the magical seems almost too possible: a winged cat wreaks havoc in a Yorkshire workhouse and then in the minds of a succession of owners; a famed stunt eater introduces his apprentice, Captain Gusto, to the delicate art of devouring anything for a living; a blooming romance between two meat-pie makers leads thirty-two adorned donkeys to the altar. Wholly original and as assured as folklore, Eating Mammals marks the arrival of a very distinctive new voice.
John Barlow's prize-winning fiction and non-fiction has been published by HarperCollins/William Morrow, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 4th Estate and various others in the UK, US, Australia, Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.
His current project is the LS9 crime series. Set in the north of England, it follows the life of John Ray, the half-Spanish son of crime boss Antonio 'Tony' Ray. The series will eventually comprise nine novels.
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John was born in West Yorkshire, England, in 1967. He worked as a musician before studying English Literature at Cambridge University and language acquisition at Hull University. After teaching English for several years, he moved to Spain to write full-time, and has been there ever since. He is married to Susana, with whom he has two sons. They currently live in the Galician city of A Coruña.
Apart from writing fiction, he also works as a ghost writer and journalist. He has written for the Washington Post, Slate.com, Penthouse, Departures Magazine and The Big Issue, and he is currently a feature writer for the award-winning food magazine Spain Gourmetour.
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John's first published work, a novella, won the Paris Review's prestigious Discovery (Plimpton) Prize in 2002. He went on to publish a collection of novellas, EATING MAMMALS, the novel INTOXICATED, set in the late nineteenth century, and EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL, a food-travelogue about Spain. He then published the off-beat noir novel WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO JERRY PICCO? under the pseudonym Joe Flores, before embarking on the LS9 series, which is scheduled to take him a decade to complete.
John has also worked with the conceptual artists goldin+enneby on their ACÉPHALE project, which has so far taken him to Nassau, Bergamo, Oslo and London, and into the company of Bahamian off-shore bankers, defamation layers, prize-winning artists, and Martina Navratilova. His writing for the project has been published variously in English, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Portuguese, and has featured at numerous art shows/galleries in the UK, the US, Canada, Brazil, Spain, Sweden, Norway and Italy.The novel HEADLESS, based on the project, is scehduled for release in 1212.
This review is from: Eating Mammals: Three Novellas (Paperback)
The three novellas of this book's title are: the title story 'Eating Mammals' which is about a professional eater called Captain Gusto, (kind of like Kobayashi Takeru only he'll literally eat anything), 'The Possession of Thomas-Bessie: a Victorian Melodrama' about a strange cat, born with a pair of small wings (don't worry, it's not in the least cutesy or cat-fancieresque), and finally 'The Donkey Wedding at Gomersal, recounted by an inhabitant of that place' about a rather odd wedding (I'll let you guess what exactly was odd about it).
They're all good solid stories, engagingly written, but the title story takes the cake, so to speak. I don't want to spoil it, but one of the last scenes is so perfectly, viscerally, stomach-churningly written that I literally felt sick reading it. Anyone can write a gross-out scene, but this is different, it was kind of a gross-out elevated to the level of art.
I recommend this book to all comers (provided they have a strong stomach) and I invite you to check out the author's first full-length novel 'Intoxicated', which I'm eagerly looking forward to reading.
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This review is from: Eating Mammals: Three Novellas (Paperback)
I bought the book just a few days ago and managed to read it in its entirety in just two days. The writing is excellent--quick-witted and even a little bit tongue-in-cheek at times--and the stories themselves are great. Yes, at times they are quite gross, but, really, the humor outweighs it by a landslide. This book is definitely worth a read.
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This review is from: Eating Mammals: Three Novellas (Paperback)
While another reviewer found this book to be both "touching" and "disgusting", I found it to be simply disgusting.
I was entranced by the back cover of the book; the synopsis it presented was enticing. However, though tales of winged cats and men who can consume all things sound innocuous enough, the actual tales are revolting. Be prepared for tales of eating rotten dog and gruesome descriptions of animal cruelty.
I was so repulsed I couldn't finish the book.
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