The Theoretical Foot

I sank into The Theoretical Foot like a fat strawberry into whipped cream ... Intimate and moral, funny and wise, there is something incantatory about her style, though no sooner has she hypnotised you than she'll bring you sharply back to your senses ... She is not, you see, just a great food writer. She is a great writer, full stop -- Rachel Cooke * Observer * A nuanced story ... in which a celebrated non-fiction writer finds her stride as a novelist ... A lyrical and witty examination of tensions arising within a bohemian group * Big Issue * The sensual description that is a hallmark of Fisher's writing is very much in evidence ... The tension between sensuality and propriety, between responsibility and pleasure, holds the novel together. Its ripeness pushes against the mores of the time ... She put the book away, and would say, years later, I am not a novelist . But this slender, haunting novel proves, after all, that she was -- Erica Wagner * Financial Times * Admirably, The Theoretical Foot deals with both poles - the perfect nothingness, lightness and frivolity of the days before tragedy, and the squirming aftermath ... But because this is M.F.K. Fisher (even young M.F.K. Fisher, still coming into her remarkable voice), the frivolity has its own value. It is beautiful. It is youth and second-youth, the joy of living in a time before sadness * NPR * Beautiful ... Dream-like * Emerald Street * Small dramas acquire the status of rumbling storms ... More than the shadows of Nazism, these jarring, hallucinatory scenes convey both doom and agony ... It has the unflinching sparseness Fisher's admirers rely on, along with the essential eruptions of sensuality * New York Times * I do not know of anyone in the United States . . . who writes better prose -- W. H. Auden Poet of the appetites -- John Updike If I were still teaching high-school English, I'd use [Fisher's] books to show how to write simply, how to enjoy food and drink but, most of all, how to enjoy life. Her books and letters are one feast after another -- Frank McCourt In a properly run culture, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher would be recognized as one of the great writers this country has produced in this century * New York Times Book Review * I cannot wait to read The Theoretical Foot, the only novel by the great American food writer MFK Fisher. A story of Americans abroad in the late 1930s, against the backdrop of the coming war, is right up my street -- Sarah Churchwell * Guardian * A lyrically written novel with modernist hints, dream-like in places, rich in character portraits, and a strange but beguiling blend of beauty and horror ... A strange erotic tension simmers throughout the narrative in a way that makes looking at a gorgeous view or eating something delicious an act of sensual avarice ... A very engaging novel that exerts a subtle grip ... If you like writers like Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamund Lehman, this is definitely worth your time * Shiny New Books *