Blue Hunger
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ISBN10: 163557949X
ISBN13: 9781635579499
Hardcover
224 Pages
$27.00
CA$36.00
After her twin's death, a solitary young woman leaves Rome for Shanghai, the city where her brother Ruben had long dreamed of opening a restaurant. Teaching Italian to Chinese students, she meets a mysterious girl named Xu, who is also running from a turbulent past: a violent father, an absent mother, and an extended family who wishes she'd been a boy. Xu's house is dingy and full of rotting food, like a museum of decomposing organic matter. In the gloom of abandoned textile factories and dilapidated slaughterhouses, the two discover an extreme dimension where biting, swallowing, and taking each other in are part of the erotic ritual.
Rooted in an experience of cultural limbo, Blue Hunger takes the reader on a visually stunning, taboo-demolishing journey into the depths of the psyche, from mourning to falling in lust-all in a city of potent dreams, stories, and stimulations.
Reviews
Praise for Blue Hunger
“Blue Hunger is irresistible, evocative, dripping with desire, and brilliantly written—Viola Di Grado is a genius.”—Jami Attenberg, New York Times
“Blue Hunger is a most vibrant novel about lust: beautifully written and full of sensuous images, Viola Di Grado's book is a powerful literary journey into food and sex and the city. In depicting the constant foreignness of falling in love, Di Grado reveals herself as a true master of style.”—Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know and Cleopatra Goes to Prison
“Viola Di Grado is, most importantly, a powerful and original writer; the fact that she also writes, movingly and with complexity, about members of the LGBT population, renders her work all the more singular.”—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours
“Blue Hunger is a devastating study of the ways in which grief renders everything, even the self, foreign. A gorgeous grotesquerie of lust and despair backdropped by the writhing rhythms of Shanghai.”—Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
“Sticky, neon, and electric, Blue Hunger drips with desire, danger, and hunger in myriad forms.”—Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater
“Blue Hunger's is a disorientating world made strange by grief—a world where words have lost their meaning, and identity fragments. In luminous and startling prose, Viola Di Grado lays bare the risk inherent in human relationships, the capacity we have to inflict and enjoy pain as well as pleasure, and the disassembling power of grief. Bold and addictive, this is a carnal, sensual, drug-and-sex-infused trip of a novel.”—Imogen Crimp, author of A Very Nice Girl
“Haunting . . . An erotic and disturbing depiction of the effects of grief.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Readers will be fascinated by the novel's scenery, psychological acuity . . . Queerness, grief, isolation, dependence, and love merge in this novel of geographically-based healing and descent.”—Booklist
“A sensuous and biting account . . . It's worth indulging in this visceral story.”—Publishers Weekly