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OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN BARLOW EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL is a travelogue, a food book, and a memoir about Galicia in Northern Spain.  'Everything But The Squeal' makes you want to get on the next flight to Santiago de Compestella and find that restaurant to eat Cocido. Rick Stein It begins in January with a gargantuan serving of pork stew and turnip greens (cocido), and culminates with a traditional pig slaughter (big knife, no anesthetic) in December. The book is a fond, year-long sojourn amongst a highly idiosyncratic rural population, where food is an obsession, and servings are hearty. The mission is to visit as many out-of-the-way places as possible, and to sample a different part of the pig in each one. By the end of the book, the entire animal will have been eaten at least once. On the way we meet an ex-president, a saintly pig called Anton (who was given the freedom of his village) and Fidel Castro’s favourite cousin (the Castros emigrated to Cuba from Galicia). There's an isolated hippie commune and a whole array of eccentric characters from Galicia’s rural backwaters, as well as a long, drunken evening at an ant-throwing and pig head-eating bacchanal in the village of Laza, one of the oldest and strangest folk festivals in the world. There's pig-bladder puddings and pig brain terrine, as well as just about every other possible way of eating the porker. All washed it down with lots of wine. Salud! EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL was a finalist at the Cordon Bleu World Food Awards, 2010. First published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in the US. *** INTOXICATED: A Novel of Money, Madness, and the Invention of the World's Favorite Soft Drink  Set in 1869, the novel tells the story of a family of Yorkshire industrialists whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of Rodrigo Vermilion, a foul-smelling hunchback midget dressed in rags. INTOXICATED is a booze-swilling, cocaine-soaked novel of excess and madness in rural Yorkshire, set amid the great commercial developments of the late nineteenth century. It’s a novel about drinking, about invention and re-invention, about home, language... and soft drinks. INTOXICATED was named as a BookSense Notable Title and an Editor’s Choice at the Historical Novel Society Read an extract, or see a 45-second video version of the novel. Deutsch (lesen und extrahiernen) First published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in the US. *** EATING MAMMALS is a collection of three novellas, all of them about mammals and all based (loosely) on fact.  First is a story about a man who eats furniture for a living. Next, a tale about a winged cat named Thomas-Bessie. Finally, a romance between two pie makers, set in the Yorkshire village of Gomersal. Read an extract here. The novellas: ‘Eating Mammals' (previously published in the Paris Review, and winner of the Discovery/Plimpton Prize), ‘The Possession of Thomas-Bessie’, ‘The Donkey Wedding at Gomersal’ First published by 4th Estate in the UK and HarperCollins in the US. |
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| Content © 2011 John Barlow. | |||