“We begin eating, with enthusiasm. The risotto is slippery and mild, the squash is sweet, the chicken is swimming in butter. It makes me want to cry, it’s so good.” — from The Time Traveler’s Wife
According to Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, cooking is one of the things that makes us human. I would argue another important thing on that list is storytelling. Perhaps this is why good stories so often involve food.
Today is the debut of Novel Dishes, a new occasional series on Fiction Writers Review.
Ethan Gilsdorf, a former Dungeons and Dragons addict and seasoned pop-culture and travel journalist, chronicles his international odyssey through the worlds of Harry Potter bands, medieval reenactment societies, World of Warcraft guilds, and massive fantasy conventions, to name only a few. In the process he learns to come to terms with his own attachment to the imaginary that has persisted into his forties. As a dedicated fairytale and myth fanatic myself, my curiosity was piqued by the title of the book which is at once a memoir, an insider’s guide to the world of gaming, and a quest that takes him all around the world to find answers not only to his own life, but to the larger question of why tens of millions of people turn away from reality and fully embrace fantastical other-existences.
