Front cover of The Hunger Book: A Memoir from Communist Poland, by Agata Izabela Brewer, featuring an image of a woman's hand holding in her fingertips a fly agaric mushroom.

The Hunger Book

A Memoir from Communist Poland

Agata Izabela Brewer

240 pp. 5.5 x 8.5

Pub Date: EXPECTED September, 2023

Subjects: Creative Nonfiction

Series: 21st Century Essays

Imprint: Mad Creek

Preorder Paperback $24.95   ISBN: 978-0-8142-5878-1

“A fascinating story of one woman’s divided loyalties, an ode and a lament told in brisk and unusual prose. Brewer does a gorgeous job of tying together the toxic and beneficial sides of mushrooms, mothers, and motherlands. A page-turner from which I learned a great deal.” —Jennifer Croft, Booker Prize–winning translator of Olga Tokarczuk’s work

“What a rare and harrowing pleasure! Agata Izabela Brewer spins a bleak, tender, gorgeously riveting tale from material both sweepingly political and mesmerizingly intimate. The miracle—and our great good fortune—is that she survived, that she is here to tell it.” —Joy Castro, author of One Brilliant Flame

The Hunger Book is vivid, startling, and lush with the smells of wild mushrooms and rose petal jam. This captivating family story reminds us that we hunger for more than food.” —Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire

In The Hunger Book, Agata Izabela Brewer evokes her Polish childhood under Communism, where the warmth of her grandparents’ love and the scent of mushrooms drying in a tiny apartment are as potent as the deprivations and traumas of life with a terrifyingly unstable, alcoholic single mother. Brewer indelibly renders stories of foraging for food, homemade potato vodka (one of the Eastern Bloc’s more viable currencies), blood sausage, sparrows plucked and fried with linseed oil, and the respite of a country garden plot, all amid Stalinist-era apartment buildings, food shortages, martial law, and nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine.

Brewer reflects on all of this from her immigrant’s vantage point, as she wryly tries to convince her children to enjoy the mushrooms she gathers from a roadside and grieves when they choose to go by Americanized versions of their Polish names. Hunting mushrooms, like her childhood, carried both reward and mortal peril. The Hunger Book, which includes recipes, is an unforgettable meditation on motherhood and addiction, resilience and love.

Author Photo

Agata Izabela Brewer was born and raised in Poland. A teacher, a mother, an activist for immigrant rights, and a Court Appointed Special Advocate, she is Professor of English at Wabash College. Her creative writing has appeared in Guernica and Entropy. The Hunger Book is her first book of creative nonfiction.

Contents

Acknowledgments

 

Mushrooms

Birds

Roots

Lard

Bread

Blood

Carp

Vodka

Mushrooms II

Hunger

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