In HUNGRY FOR YOU, Joan Smith turns her attention to this infinitely intriguing. A collection of her own sharp, funny and stimulating essays on our attitudes to food and eating is accompanied and amplified by a fascinating selection of extracts from novels, tracts, songs, self-help books, poetry and biography. Her essays look at cannibalism and the strange imagination of the man-eating serial killers; at the politics of starvation and anorexia; at sexual 'appetite'; at taboos, and the connection between the stricture of Leviticus and the regimes of Rosemary Conley. Each essay is followed by a series of extracts: from Piers Paul Read's chilling account of cannibalism to Nora Ephron on the comforts of mashed potatoes; from the Princess of Wales talking about bulimia to Proust's voluptuous appreciation of the shape and colour of asparagus, and gems from Catullus, Madonna, Swift, Brian Keenan, Freud, and Lorrie.

ジョーン・スミスによる本作は、単なる食文化の解説書ではありません。人間の深層に潜む「飢え」という根源的欲求を、カニバリズムから拒食症、性愛に至るまで、鮮やかに解剖した挑発的な一冊です。食をめぐるタブーや政治性を、著者の鋭利なエッセイと文学的引用が交錯する構成で描き出し、私たちの「食べる」という行為が持つ狂気と美しさを浮き彫りにします。 プルーストからマドンナまで、時空を超えた言葉が織りなす知のタペストリーは圧巻です。読み進めるうちに食卓は欲望の戦場へと姿を変え、読者は自らの身体と精神の境界を見失うような快感に包まれるでしょう。知的好奇心を極限まで刺激する、まさに知性の饗宴と呼ぶにふさわしい名著です。