Delicious Foods

by James Hannaham

Darlene, a young widow and mother devastated by the death of her husband, turns to drugs to erase the trauma. In this fog of grief, she is lured with the promise of a great job to a mysterious farm run by a shady company, with disastrous consequences for both her and her eleven-year-old son, Eddie--left behind in a panic-stricken search for her.

Delicious Foods tells the gripping story of three unforgettable characters: a mother, her son, and the drug that threatens to destroy them. In Darlene's haunted struggle to reunite with Eddie, and in the efforts of both to triumph over those who would enslave them, Hannaham's daring and shape-shifting prose not only infuses their desperate circumstances with grace and humor, but also wrestles with timeless questions of love and freedom.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Race, African American, Adult

371 pages, Hardcover

First published March 17, 2015

About the author

James Hannaham is the author of the novel Delicious Foods, winner of the 2016 PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction, the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His first novel, God Says No, was published by McSweeney's in 2009 and was a finalist for a Lambda Book Award, a semifinalist for a VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and was named an honor book by the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Awards. His short fiction has appeared in BOMB, The Literary Review, Nerve.com, Open City, and several anthologies. He has written for the Village Voice, Spin, Blender, Out, Us, New York Magazine, The Barnes & Noble Review and The New York Times Magazine. Once upon a time in 2008, he was a staff writer at Salon.com. He has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and Fundación Valparaíso and a NYFFA Fellowship. He teaches in the Department of Writing at the Pratt Institute. In November 2021, Soft Skull published Pilot Impostor, a multi-genre book of responses to poems by Fernando Pessoa, and in 2022, Little, Brown will release his third novel, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta.