The Devil’s Larder was published by Viking in 2001. It consists of sixty-four very short pieces — some barely a page, none longer than a few pages — each concerning food in some form: growing it, cooking it, eating it, refusing it, remembering it, using it as weapon or currency or sacrament.
The pieces range widely in tone and form: some are realistic narratives (a woman discovering that her dead mother’s recipe doesn’t work without her mother’s hands), some are fables (a town where food grows from the corpses of the buried dead), some are essays (on the psychology of disgust), some are prose poems. What connects them is Crace’s insistence on food as the primary site where culture, desire, and the body intersect: we are what we eat, and how we eat reveals who we are.
The brevity of the pieces allows Crace to experiment more freely than in his novels: some pieces are fragmentary, some circular, some deliberately incomplete. The cumulative effect is not of a short story collection but of an extended meditation on a single subject from sixty-four angles — a cubist portrait of humanity’s relationship with sustenance.
Collecting The Devil’s Larder
First edition (Viking, London, 2001): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $10–$20