Whether perusing a recipe or learning what a literary character eats, readers approach a text differently when reading about food. Read My Plate: The Literature of Food explores what narrators and characters (in fiction, in performance, and in the popular genre of the "food memoir") cook and eat. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the inmates of the Terezin concentration camp, performance artist Karen Finley, novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and the celebrated chef-turned-travel-journalist Anthony Bourdain are just a few examples of the writers whose works are discussed. Close readings of the literal and figurative "plates" in these texts allow a unique form of intimate access to the speakers' feelings and memories and helps readers to understand more about how the dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and social class affect what the narrators/characters eat, from tourtiere to collard greens to a school lunch bento box.

Whether perusing a recipe or learning what a literary character eats, readers approach a text differently when reading about food. Read My Plate: The Literature of Food explores what narrators and characters (in fiction, in performance, and in the popular genre of the "food memoir") cook and eat. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the inmates of the Terezin concentration camp, performance artist Karen Finley, novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and the celebrated chef-turned-travel-journalist Anthony Bourdain are just a few examples of the writers whose works are discussed. Close readings of the literal and figurative "plates" in these texts allow a unique form of intimate access to the speakers' feelings and memories and helps readers to understand more about how the dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and social class affect what the narrators/characters eat, from tourtiere to collard greens to a school lunch bento box.

Praise for playwright Suzan-Lori Parks:

"Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most important dramatists America has produced."
---Tony Kushner

" Parks's] stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and marvelous."
---"Time"

Suzan-Lori Parks is one of America's most distinctive playwrights. In 2007 her creation "365 Plays/365 Days" was produced in more than seven hundred theaters around the world. She has been named one of "Time" magazine's "100 Innovators for the Next New Wave" and is a recipient of the MacArthur Award. A former student of James Baldwin, Parks is a prolific author with novels, screenplays, and even a musical to her credit, but she is best known for her plays. Works such as "Topdog/Underdog, In the Blood, Venus, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, " and "The America Play" have been widely produced and have won the highest honors (including the Pulitzer Prize and two Obies), but to date, books on Parks have been scarce.

The latest addition to the Michigan Modern Dramatists series offers an indispensable guide to Parks's dramatic works, taking a close look at her major plays and placing them in context. Deborah R. Geis traces the evolution of Parks's art from her earliest experimental pieces to the hugely popular "Topdog/Underdog" to her wide-ranging forays into fiction, music, and film.

Deborah R. Geis is Associate Professor of English at DePauw University. Her books include "Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama; Approaching the Millennium: Essays on" Angels in America (coedited with Steven F. Kruger); and "Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust."

In 1992, Art Spiegelman's two-volume illustrated work Maus: A Survivor's Tale was awarded a special-category Pulitzer Prize. In a comic book form, Spiegelman tells the gripping, heart-rending story of his father's experiences in the Holocaust. The book renders in stark clarity the trials Spiegelman's father endured as a Jewish refugee in the ghettos and concentration camps of Poland during World War II, his American life following his immigration to New York, and the author's own troubled sense of self as he grapples with his father's history. Mixing autobiography, biography, and oral history in the comic form, Maus has been hailed as a daring work of postmodern narration and as a vivid example of the power of the graphic narrative. Now, for the first time in one collection, prominent scholars in a variety of fields take on Spiegelman's text and offer it the critical and artistic scrutiny it deserves. They explore many aspects of the work, including Spiegelman's use of animal characters, the influence of other ""comix"" artists, the role of the mother and its relation to gender issues, the use of repeating images such as smoke and blood, Maus's position among Holocaust testimonials, its appropriation of cinematic technique, its use of language and styles of dialect, and the implications of the work's critical and commercial success. Informed readers in many areas of study, from popular culture and graphic arts to psychoanalysis and oral history, will value this first substantial collection of criticism on a revered work of literature.