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Creamy & Delicious
Creamy and Steve Creamy and Random FIRST First Edition Thus, First Printing. Not price-clipped. Published by Random House, 1970. Octavo. Hardcover. Book is very good with tear to bottom corner of front flyleaf and 1st page. Dust jacket is very good. Great copy of this collection of compelling stories by Steve Katz. 100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Sag Harbor, New York.Seller 329205 Short Stories We Buy Books! Collections - Libraries - Estates - Individual Titles. Message us if you have books to sell!
- GenresShort StoriesNovels
204 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
1 person is currently reading
197 people want to read
About the author
Steve Katz
28 books9 followersSteve Katz (May 14, 1935 – August 4, 2019) was an American writer. He is considered an early post-modern or avant-garde writer for works such as The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968), and Saw (1972).
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 12, 2025
The weirdest of the weird…
3 Satisfying Stories… A woman finds herself in three, one after another, very strange places… And she participates in very strange things…
5 Mythologies: Faust, Diana, Plastic Man, Hermes, Wonder Woman…
And in this singularly true story he was a farmer and incorrigible libertine… Diana is a huntress not a temptress… Plastic man is omnipresent… Hermes was as fast as the wind… And Wonder Woman was a dike…
Kelly is a kind of absurdist mystery tale…
5 Mythologies: Thomas, Nasser, Goliath, Crane, Oedipus
Thomas was an undying criminal with a radio…
However the story isn’t about Nasser… Once upon a time three men: a wise one, a healthy one and a rich one met Goliath… Crane is a mysterious thing or probably a creature… Oedipus is a modern day Oedipus…
Nino is a tale of going but arriving nowhere… Mocking and preposterous Mythologies continue…
And there is also a vers libre dadaistic poem In Our Thyme threading through the book…
Sometimes imagination may fly far beyond any reason…
3 Satisfying Stories… A woman finds herself in three, one after another, very strange places… And she participates in very strange things…
5 Mythologies: Faust, Diana, Plastic Man, Hermes, Wonder Woman…
Don’t believe any of those stories you had to read in college about Faust, the big scientist who wanted to know all the shit in the world, so he turned on with the devil.
And in this singularly true story he was a farmer and incorrigible libertine… Diana is a huntress not a temptress… Plastic man is omnipresent… Hermes was as fast as the wind… And Wonder Woman was a dike…
Kelly is a kind of absurdist mystery tale…
5 Mythologies: Thomas, Nasser, Goliath, Crane, Oedipus
Thomas was an undying criminal with a radio…
There was a small unshaven man in Jerusalem called Nasser who worked at a café inside the Damascus Gate. He carried cherry-red coals to your hookah when you smoked. His clothes were a simple black smock tied with a piece of rope around the middle, a black, gold-embroidered skullcap and worn slippers. “War is ugly, but peace is lovely,” he shouted when he approached to take your order.
However the story isn’t about Nasser… Once upon a time three men: a wise one, a healthy one and a rich one met Goliath… Crane is a mysterious thing or probably a creature… Oedipus is a modern day Oedipus…
Nino is a tale of going but arriving nowhere… Mocking and preposterous Mythologies continue…
And there is also a vers libre dadaistic poem In Our Thyme threading through the book…
Sometimes just one more bite and
I feel on the edge of a precipice.
Too many holidays, too many
specimens, too much stuffing.
I’ve got my credentials to hang me up.
Sometimes imagination may fly far beyond any reason…
February 4, 2016
A mixed bag of freewheeling sixties experimental writing, but with five-star moments like this one:
Read
December 15, 2015Prologue
Very few people read this book apparently. If they do read it, it goes unremarked upon. Check on Amazon (no ratings; no reviews), the *other* book cataloguing site (one rating; no reviews), this very site (nine ratings; one review (but not really)). I don’t write reviews very often. There are several reasons for this, none of which I’ll bother to get into, but I think since I read this book – cover to cover even – I owe it one. What I won’t do, however, is assign a star rating since I could make an argument for one, five, or anywhere in between. So I will now pen the, as I write this, one and only review of Creamy & Delicious by Steve Katz. I take this responsibility very lightly.
A Review Interrupted by Two Reflections
Review I
“I think it’s amazing that I’ve been published at all. First of all, you know, I write some pretty weird books.”
- Steve Katz, in an interview with Ronald Sukenick
Yes. Yes, he does. This is really a collection of combinations of words, some of which are organized in a way to coalesce into what might be called a “story.” But others don’t. Some have what might be called a plot, loosely defined. Some don’t. Some have characters. Others don’t. Katz refers to most of these segregated combinations of words as “Mythologies,” and each is titled after a fictional (or sometimes non-fictional) character. But don’t let that fool you: the “story” may or may not relate in any meaningful sense to the character in the title. Some books have you wondering what the next chapter will bring, some even have you wondering what might happen in the next paragraph. With Katz, you never know what the next word will be. The phrase “He was feeling hungry so he” could be followed by “ate the leftover pizza in the fridge” just as easily as “took a shower without disrobing”; “went to sleep on the floor”; “ascended the stairs to the roof and jumped off.” In fact, the pizza example is probably the least likely.
Reflection A
This was a hard book to read. Hard in this case meaning difficult, not not-soft. Although, now that I think about it, I suppose it was hard like that too because it wasn’t soft. But it wasn’t difficult because of the words; I knew all the words. All of them, each and every one. I think it was hard, I mean difficult, mostly because it was etched into my neighbor’s garden hose. I noticed it the other day while I was talking to my neighbor while he was outside watering his wife’s bush, so when he went back inside I started trying to read it. Then I realized the reason it was so hard to read was because it was in that mirror-writing, so I had to haul the garden hose into my bathroom and hold it up to the mirror so that the words were the right way round. Then, of course, I had to translate it from Coptic. I don’t know why Steve Katz chose to write his book in Coptic. Or carve it into my neighbor’s garden hose backwards. I thought to myself: More people would probably read this book if it were more accessible. Then I realized there’s also a version in print form. In English. But it’s old (the book, not the English). So then I thought: maybe not.
Review II
The first three related (or are they?) pieces in the book are collectively titled “satisfying stories,” and these really set up the approach of much of rest of the book. Why? Because they are not “satisfying” in the way people normally conceive of that word. Each story—and in this case they really are stories—is only a few pages long and each begins with the same sentence or two that concludes the previous story (or, in the case of the third story, the ending is the same as the beginning of the first). Each story has an unnamed female in an unexplained strange situation. In one, for example, she may or may not be dead for all or part of the story. The female appears to be the same person in the three stories based on physical attributes, but this is never made explicit. These three stories, for me at least, were “satisfying” in the sense that they are interesting and clever, and that’s a VERY important sense. Maybe the most important. Although if you had asked me, after reading them, for one word to describe them, “satisfying” wouldn’t have been anywhere close to the top of the list even though they were satisfying in a sense, just not the sense that people usually mean when they use that word. This, I think, is part of what Katz is up to here: twisting and distorting things (events, characters, language) in a way that the reader has no clue what to expect. It’s disorienting. Although in this post-Forrest Gump world the box of chocolates analogy is overused and trite, there’s a bit of that going on here. As an example, Katz has titled one Mythology after Ghandi, but in this myth, Ghandi is an earthworm. [Aside: I thought about a “spoiler” tag here, but that whole concept seems ridiculous for a work like this.] Some of these Mythologies do bear some recognizable aspects to the stories of the character after whom they’re titled (Oedipus, for example), but don’t expect it. In fact, leave pretty much any expectations at the door (or cover).
NoitcelfeR XIS
So, as I wrote up front, I don’t write book reviews on this site very often for a couple of reasons. I also wrote that I wasn’t going to go into why, but I lied. First and foremost, I’m simply not very good at it. I’m sufficiently self-aware to have a pretty firm grasp of my strengths and weaknesses, and writing book reviews simply isn’t one of the former. However, because I’m a large consumer of reviews on Goodreads, I’m also very well aware of the fact that many people who do write book reviews on Goodreads also aren’t very good at it. (I’m thinking here primarily of ones that generally start with some variation on the comment “I really wanted to like this, but…” or that are simply some tired formulation of “If you put Author A, Author B, and Author C into a blender (or if they jointly had a child or if one was the other’s editor), you’d have this…”) Although being not-very-good at reviews doesn’t stop many people from actually writing them, it does stop me from adding to the pile. Most of the time. Secondly, and this is probably both cause and effect of the first, I don’t care to spend the time on reviews to do them justice. I assume if I wrote them more often or took the time (or both), I might improve my abilities, but because it’s not a skill I’m striving to master, I don’t. Thirdly, and this is where we come around to the fact I wrote this one, there are generally plenty of decent-to-good reviews and oftentimes several excellent reviews of most books. So, why bother taking the time and effort to add yet another mediocre review (beyond the easy and quick yet wildly inaccurate star rating)? On this third point, there aren’t any reviews of this book. None. Zero. Well, now there is one. Mine. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But neither does this book. And since no one reads this book, or has really even heard of it outside of that zany Larry McCaffery list, it stands to reason that no one will probably ever read this review.
Review III
Summation: I would imagine most people aren’t going to terribly enjoy Creamy & Delicious. It’s a bit too goofy for most, and to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure just how much longer I would have stayed the course, but at a svelte 203 pages—and many of those with only a handful of words or just pictures (yes, there are many pictures)—it’s a quick read. Notwithstanding my general annoyance at the reviewing-by-comparing framework, I think in this case it’s helpful to relate Katz’s work to Mark Leyner at his more abstract and absurd, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. By Goodreading standards, it looks like Leyner is about 100 times more read than Katz, so some may find the comparison helpful. I found the Leyner works I’ve read funnier and more relatable, but that’s probably a function of my age and the time in which I live – I’m closer to Leyner’s pop culture and environment than Katz’s. But Katz laid the groundwork; after reading this, I’ve no doubt about that. I would give this collection five stars. Out of ten. If my math is right, that means on the Goodreads system it gets four. Peace out.
[If you’ve read this far, that quote at the top is legitimate. The whole interview is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyQbC... A word of warning, though: it’s surprisingly boring; most interesting takeaway: Sukenick and Katz were at Cornell together at the same time as Pynchon, Gass, and Nabokov (teaching). The Larry McCaffery list can be seen here, scroll to 91 for Stevie K: http://spinelessbooks.com/mccaffery/100/.]
Very few people read this book apparently. If they do read it, it goes unremarked upon. Check on Amazon (no ratings; no reviews), the *other* book cataloguing site (one rating; no reviews), this very site (nine ratings; one review (but not really)). I don’t write reviews very often. There are several reasons for this, none of which I’ll bother to get into, but I think since I read this book – cover to cover even – I owe it one. What I won’t do, however, is assign a star rating since I could make an argument for one, five, or anywhere in between. So I will now pen the, as I write this, one and only review of Creamy & Delicious by Steve Katz. I take this responsibility very lightly.
A Review Interrupted by Two Reflections
Review I
“I think it’s amazing that I’ve been published at all. First of all, you know, I write some pretty weird books.”
- Steve Katz, in an interview with Ronald Sukenick
Yes. Yes, he does. This is really a collection of combinations of words, some of which are organized in a way to coalesce into what might be called a “story.” But others don’t. Some have what might be called a plot, loosely defined. Some don’t. Some have characters. Others don’t. Katz refers to most of these segregated combinations of words as “Mythologies,” and each is titled after a fictional (or sometimes non-fictional) character. But don’t let that fool you: the “story” may or may not relate in any meaningful sense to the character in the title. Some books have you wondering what the next chapter will bring, some even have you wondering what might happen in the next paragraph. With Katz, you never know what the next word will be. The phrase “He was feeling hungry so he” could be followed by “ate the leftover pizza in the fridge” just as easily as “took a shower without disrobing”; “went to sleep on the floor”; “ascended the stairs to the roof and jumped off.” In fact, the pizza example is probably the least likely.
Reflection A
This was a hard book to read. Hard in this case meaning difficult, not not-soft. Although, now that I think about it, I suppose it was hard like that too because it wasn’t soft. But it wasn’t difficult because of the words; I knew all the words. All of them, each and every one. I think it was hard, I mean difficult, mostly because it was etched into my neighbor’s garden hose. I noticed it the other day while I was talking to my neighbor while he was outside watering his wife’s bush, so when he went back inside I started trying to read it. Then I realized the reason it was so hard to read was because it was in that mirror-writing, so I had to haul the garden hose into my bathroom and hold it up to the mirror so that the words were the right way round. Then, of course, I had to translate it from Coptic. I don’t know why Steve Katz chose to write his book in Coptic. Or carve it into my neighbor’s garden hose backwards. I thought to myself: More people would probably read this book if it were more accessible. Then I realized there’s also a version in print form. In English. But it’s old (the book, not the English). So then I thought: maybe not.
Review II
The first three related (or are they?) pieces in the book are collectively titled “satisfying stories,” and these really set up the approach of much of rest of the book. Why? Because they are not “satisfying” in the way people normally conceive of that word. Each story—and in this case they really are stories—is only a few pages long and each begins with the same sentence or two that concludes the previous story (or, in the case of the third story, the ending is the same as the beginning of the first). Each story has an unnamed female in an unexplained strange situation. In one, for example, she may or may not be dead for all or part of the story. The female appears to be the same person in the three stories based on physical attributes, but this is never made explicit. These three stories, for me at least, were “satisfying” in the sense that they are interesting and clever, and that’s a VERY important sense. Maybe the most important. Although if you had asked me, after reading them, for one word to describe them, “satisfying” wouldn’t have been anywhere close to the top of the list even though they were satisfying in a sense, just not the sense that people usually mean when they use that word. This, I think, is part of what Katz is up to here: twisting and distorting things (events, characters, language) in a way that the reader has no clue what to expect. It’s disorienting. Although in this post-Forrest Gump world the box of chocolates analogy is overused and trite, there’s a bit of that going on here. As an example, Katz has titled one Mythology after Ghandi, but in this myth, Ghandi is an earthworm. [Aside: I thought about a “spoiler” tag here, but that whole concept seems ridiculous for a work like this.] Some of these Mythologies do bear some recognizable aspects to the stories of the character after whom they’re titled (Oedipus, for example), but don’t expect it. In fact, leave pretty much any expectations at the door (or cover).
NoitcelfeR XIS
So, as I wrote up front, I don’t write book reviews on this site very often for a couple of reasons. I also wrote that I wasn’t going to go into why, but I lied. First and foremost, I’m simply not very good at it. I’m sufficiently self-aware to have a pretty firm grasp of my strengths and weaknesses, and writing book reviews simply isn’t one of the former. However, because I’m a large consumer of reviews on Goodreads, I’m also very well aware of the fact that many people who do write book reviews on Goodreads also aren’t very good at it. (I’m thinking here primarily of ones that generally start with some variation on the comment “I really wanted to like this, but…” or that are simply some tired formulation of “If you put Author A, Author B, and Author C into a blender (or if they jointly had a child or if one was the other’s editor), you’d have this…”) Although being not-very-good at reviews doesn’t stop many people from actually writing them, it does stop me from adding to the pile. Most of the time. Secondly, and this is probably both cause and effect of the first, I don’t care to spend the time on reviews to do them justice. I assume if I wrote them more often or took the time (or both), I might improve my abilities, but because it’s not a skill I’m striving to master, I don’t. Thirdly, and this is where we come around to the fact I wrote this one, there are generally plenty of decent-to-good reviews and oftentimes several excellent reviews of most books. So, why bother taking the time and effort to add yet another mediocre review (beyond the easy and quick yet wildly inaccurate star rating)? On this third point, there aren’t any reviews of this book. None. Zero. Well, now there is one. Mine. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But neither does this book. And since no one reads this book, or has really even heard of it outside of that zany Larry McCaffery list, it stands to reason that no one will probably ever read this review.
Review III
Summation: I would imagine most people aren’t going to terribly enjoy Creamy & Delicious. It’s a bit too goofy for most, and to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure just how much longer I would have stayed the course, but at a svelte 203 pages—and many of those with only a handful of words or just pictures (yes, there are many pictures)—it’s a quick read. Notwithstanding my general annoyance at the reviewing-by-comparing framework, I think in this case it’s helpful to relate Katz’s work to Mark Leyner at his more abstract and absurd, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. By Goodreading standards, it looks like Leyner is about 100 times more read than Katz, so some may find the comparison helpful. I found the Leyner works I’ve read funnier and more relatable, but that’s probably a function of my age and the time in which I live – I’m closer to Leyner’s pop culture and environment than Katz’s. But Katz laid the groundwork; after reading this, I’ve no doubt about that. I would give this collection five stars. Out of ten. If my math is right, that means on the Goodreads system it gets four. Peace out.
[If you’ve read this far, that quote at the top is legitimate. The whole interview is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyQbC... A word of warning, though: it’s surprisingly boring; most interesting takeaway: Sukenick and Katz were at Cornell together at the same time as Pynchon, Gass, and Nabokov (teaching). The Larry McCaffery list can be seen here, scroll to 91 for Stevie K: http://spinelessbooks.com/mccaffery/100/.]
Read
June 11, 2022Thanks to Tough Poets Press this is back in print! If you have made it to this page and you’re wondering if you should read this, the answer is “yes, definitely”. I also read Saw recently which I thought was slightly better, so be sure to read that as well. They are both short, anyone with time on their hands can finish both in 4-5 days.
This is a collection of short stories and some poetry, and while most of the stories were very funny, there were a few that were too puzzling or weird and it broke the overall flow. Unfortunately it sometimes leaves a bad taste when this was an overall positive experience. That being said I’m going to re-read all of it someday and perhaps the stories that were too bizarre will turn out to be brilliant.
I’ve done my fair share of psychedelics and I suspect Steve Katz has as well. It seems to really have impacted his creativity in a good way (I don’t know how else he comes up with some of this stuff, because hallucinogens facilitate this type of creativity). As an example one of the last stories in the book, a good looking guy (Apollo) visits cleopatra and Marilyn Monroe who both sorta want a piece of him. He ends up marrying and divorcing their 13 year old maid instead. Then someone has a flashback or a memory, and then Apollo embraces the 13 year old for the first time and she turns into a tree. So, it’s disorienting and difficult to read because so many unusual things happen, but it’s a trip and it’s a lot of fun.
Most of the book is labeled as mythology, but it usually has nothing to do with the actual mythological character. There’s oedipus, Gandhi ,Apollo, Homer, Poseidon, Faust, Wonder Woman, etc.
It opens with a trilogy called Three Satisfying Stories which was terrific, then a few others including an anti war stream of consciousness rant, and a story about blossoms.
Again it could be challenging because anything could happen, like a guy can’t buy a plot of land and develop it because, all of a sudden, it’s completely covered in plastic.
Steve Katz rules!
This is a collection of short stories and some poetry, and while most of the stories were very funny, there were a few that were too puzzling or weird and it broke the overall flow. Unfortunately it sometimes leaves a bad taste when this was an overall positive experience. That being said I’m going to re-read all of it someday and perhaps the stories that were too bizarre will turn out to be brilliant.
I’ve done my fair share of psychedelics and I suspect Steve Katz has as well. It seems to really have impacted his creativity in a good way (I don’t know how else he comes up with some of this stuff, because hallucinogens facilitate this type of creativity). As an example one of the last stories in the book, a good looking guy (Apollo) visits cleopatra and Marilyn Monroe who both sorta want a piece of him. He ends up marrying and divorcing their 13 year old maid instead. Then someone has a flashback or a memory, and then Apollo embraces the 13 year old for the first time and she turns into a tree. So, it’s disorienting and difficult to read because so many unusual things happen, but it’s a trip and it’s a lot of fun.
Most of the book is labeled as mythology, but it usually has nothing to do with the actual mythological character. There’s oedipus, Gandhi ,Apollo, Homer, Poseidon, Faust, Wonder Woman, etc.
It opens with a trilogy called Three Satisfying Stories which was terrific, then a few others including an anti war stream of consciousness rant, and a story about blossoms.
Again it could be challenging because anything could happen, like a guy can’t buy a plot of land and develop it because, all of a sudden, it’s completely covered in plastic.
Steve Katz rules!
September 12, 2025
Let me let Katz introduce himself to you in his own words. Use of capitalization is his own:
Steve Katz was born at The Bronx on May 14, 1935. Just then his family moved to Manhattan, to Washington Heights, where he attended Public School 173 and Humboldt Junior High School. He played baseball in Jayhood Wright Park, and basketball in The Schoolyard. At age nine he had his first taste of pizza. He was a founding member of the New York Bullets social and athletic club and sported their purple and gold reversible jacket. He has flown kites and ridden sleds. When Steve Katz was fifteen a kid stabbed his basketball with a stiletto. One year later he was sixteen. - Steve Katz
Well don't that beat the band.
Creamy and Delicious is an art piece made of the following elements: - Parables of the mundane about mythological characters from Greek gods to Wonderwoman - a single textured and opaque poem spread across the complete length of book, you could say both laid over the book and over itself- Heartbreaking photograhy (either from the 50s or 60s perhaps) showing a spread of Americans from different backgrounds in their daily life, in intimate moments - introspective short stories and essays with sharp experimental writing and exploration of complex situations, from fever dreams to metafictional writing instructions.
A favorite sequence for me was a profound imagining (or reflection?) on Gandhi's ethos about food and going barefoot. Here's an extract:
"We must still account for the gap there seems to be between Gandhian intelligence and human action, and the clue we are following now is the phenomenon we described at the opening of this discourse. The wisdom of the worm is the earth. Human action is exaggerated by the gap between the earth and the sole of the foot. It is a widening gap, we have seen necessary for Gandhian survival, but is widening, unfortunately..."
Steve Katz was born at The Bronx on May 14, 1935. Just then his family moved to Manhattan, to Washington Heights, where he attended Public School 173 and Humboldt Junior High School. He played baseball in Jayhood Wright Park, and basketball in The Schoolyard. At age nine he had his first taste of pizza. He was a founding member of the New York Bullets social and athletic club and sported their purple and gold reversible jacket. He has flown kites and ridden sleds. When Steve Katz was fifteen a kid stabbed his basketball with a stiletto. One year later he was sixteen. - Steve Katz
Well don't that beat the band.
Creamy and Delicious is an art piece made of the following elements: - Parables of the mundane about mythological characters from Greek gods to Wonderwoman - a single textured and opaque poem spread across the complete length of book, you could say both laid over the book and over itself- Heartbreaking photograhy (either from the 50s or 60s perhaps) showing a spread of Americans from different backgrounds in their daily life, in intimate moments - introspective short stories and essays with sharp experimental writing and exploration of complex situations, from fever dreams to metafictional writing instructions.
A favorite sequence for me was a profound imagining (or reflection?) on Gandhi's ethos about food and going barefoot. Here's an extract:
"We must still account for the gap there seems to be between Gandhian intelligence and human action, and the clue we are following now is the phenomenon we described at the opening of this discourse. The wisdom of the worm is the earth. Human action is exaggerated by the gap between the earth and the sole of the foot. It is a widening gap, we have seen necessary for Gandhian survival, but is widening, unfortunately..."
May 29, 2022
I don't know if this is really a four-star book. I might be overindulgent to writing like this. Still, it's a pretty good example of that thing it is, albeit, somewhat inevitably, with a few cringily misogynistic moments.
July 26, 2018
I gobbled this up— quirky, irreverent, strangely satisfying!
May 13, 2024
60s postmodernism. I have a love hate relationship with it and this book exemplifies this. It throws itself into the dark to see what will happen and what comes back stylistically is often very interesting to read. However too often I found there was an extreme in terms of the quality of the stories. Some of them such as ‘three satisfying stories’ is brilliant whilst others dealing with mythological figures felt undercooked.
dollars-for-unearthing
May 26, 2013Some of which available on-line:
http://www.altx.com/katz/katz.htm
wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ka...
http://www.altx.com/katz/katz.htm
wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ka...
July 2, 2022
Great book, stories. Very Subgenius and Discordian.
maybe
December 22, 2015http://www.altx.com/katz/katz.htm (excerpts)
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews