This book isn't the usual kind of book about food.  It has no restaurant reviews, and very few recipes. You won’t hear about that darling place in Dordogne, but you may learn how to slice a cuttlefish. This is about food as experience. And who better to describe that experience than the French?

French Feast is a wide-ranging collection of mostly short stories with delicious idiosyncratic twists. Who would have thought that the bank robber’s gun was actually made of nougat? Or that you can starve at a chic Paris dinner when the fuses blow? Some stories are elegiac, like “The Taste of New Wine,” or rich with family memories, like “Bresse.” Others cast an ironic eye on diners’ manners—or their marriages, as in “Tears of Laughter.” Still others lusciously combine food and love: you can use porcupine stew to seduce a neighbor, or a caramel berlingot to poison a faithless lover. The trick, in food as in writing, is to do it with taste.
—William Rodarmor, editor

Whereabouts Press is an independent publisher of books that convey a sense of a place—a country, a region, a city—through stories. Unlike guidebooks written by professional travel writers, Travelers Literary Companions feature stories written by literary writers—all of whom are native to the places they write about. They didn’t write specifically for travelers. They wrote because they had good stories to tell. And their stories tell us not just about people, but about the soul of a place.