The Exile Book Of Anthology Series Number Nineteen
Editors: Candas Jane Dorsey, Ursula Pflug
Publisher: Exile Editions
Paperback: 375 pages

Eating is a symbolic and magical act—a transformation, a covenant, a ritual, a comfort, a necessity—but all through history, food-themed stories have also had their dark sides. Food can be integral to the magic, the meetings, and the processes of fantastical fiction: from myth and legend to high fantasy, from hard-science speculative fiction to post-modern magic realism, from Hansel and Gretel to Soylent Green, from Persephone to 2001, from Alice in Wonderland to Alien. In this anthology, Ursula Pflug and Candas Jane Dorsey, two award-winning senior writers of literary speculation, have gathered a range of speculative writing that recognizes both our attraction to the candy coating and our fascination with the poisoned apple. Paired with each story is a recipe, real or fantastical, for food mentioned in the story: consume at your own risk!

Praise for Food of My People

Winnipeg Free Press:
Reviewed by Chris Rutkowski
“…Some stories in the collection effectively weave the theme of food and its preparation very well indeed, such as Pho Cart No.7, by Kathy Nguyen, in which a small food cart provides exactly what its customers need, over the course of many decades. In Plumcake, by Lynn Hutchinson Lee, a young woman fends off an invader by baking, of course, a plumcake, while in Dorsey’s own Food and Magic, a kindly woman shows a young girl how to make bread pudding, with one special ingredient. There’s even a story that seems practically frivolous despite its ghastly premise: The Dance of Abundance, by Colleen Anderson, set in the whimsical yet dreadful world of Culinaria…”

Black Gate Adventures in Fantasy:
Reviewed by Matthew David Surridge
“Most of the stories are set in this world and this time, though a few take place in the future and a couple in fantastic secondary worlds. In Pflug’s Afterword, she points out that several of the stories can be described as New Weird, and if there is an overall genre tone to the book that’s probably it. The physicality of the subgenre aside, there’s something deeply weird about the process of eating, something about transformation at a deep level: ingredients into food, food into energy and shit, the whole process implausibly warding off hunger pains and sustaining life.”