Strange Gourmets

“Strange Gourmets explores, performatively and with relish, the avowedly perverse pleasures of thinking through sophistication. . . . The subject of sophistication is explored through intimate (not just close) readings of two Austen novels, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Proust, and two critical theorists of mass culture, Adorno and Barthes. . . . What makes Strange Gourmets wonderfully queer (not just gay) criticism is the multiplicity of its identifications as well as their expeditious crossings. ‘Gay,’ ‘Jewish,’ ‘intellectual’ are not simply terminal points in a self-confirming argument about identity politics but transfer stations relaying and relating a critical mind to different bodies of writing—to the world of the novels taken as imaginary versions of our own; to Barthes, gay critic of mass culture (and passionate reader of Proust); to Adorno, Jewish critic of mass culture (and passionate reader of Proust). As one might expect, this procedure finds its fullest expression in the chapter on Marcel Proust, the gay Jewish intellectual novelist who, perhaps more than any other writer, epitomizes sophistication in its most accomplished and enviable form.” - Leland Monk, Novel

“Litvak has taken taste out of the closet and shows us why so many—especially those who consider themselves to be centered in cultural studies—do not like the taste of taste. This book is as smart as it is strangely delicious.” - Carol Mavor, author of Pleasures Taken

"One can hardly call Strange Gourmets a sophisticated book, since on the embarrassing subject of itself sophistication has always been too cool for words. No, one must call it a wildly sophisticated book, uncultivated enough, for all its fine intelligence, to speak whereof it knows. Like some brilliant chef who incorporates weeds into highly composed salads, the author means not to disown, but to parade the intimacy between sophistication (his own included) and rawer forms of taste, disgust, perversity. If his richly inventive cookery is more satisfying than sociological unmaskings that are as endless as they are futile, this is not least because, unlike them, it accords sophistication the respect owed to an appetite." - D. A. Miller