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Go shoppingFood! Glorious food … we just can’t get enough of it, especially at Christmas time – on our plates, in our dreams, and especially in our books. Every December the latest gorgeously-photographed Jamie, Nigella and Gordon cooking tomes fly off the shelves so that aspirational armchair chefs can fantasise about lavish meals – and at the same time, magazines offer tips to “help you slim into that party outfit”…
Mixed messages? You bet: this time of year might be the season of giving and goodwill, but it’s also become the season of gorging and gluttony. Well, no more: Litro’s putting you on a strict diet of good writing – no junk-food thrillers, no sugary chick-lit and definitely no recipes. Instead, we’ve got a smorgasbord of succulent stories for you to indulge in this month – and the best thing is, you know it’s good for you.
In this issue you’ll find a brilliantly disastrous pre-Christmas dinner party in our extract from Comfort and Joy, India Knight’s latest comic tour de force; Kevlin Henney’s quantum take-away in Schrödinger’s Pizza; a mother and daughter at war over curries in Muslims Eat Meat by N S R Khan, and a restaurant for the lost and broken in S J Butler’s moving, atmospheric The Flotsam Cafe.
We’re also catering for more rarefied tastes with K L Gillespie’s flash fiction Dinner Date, where a young man on a bus succumbs to fleshly yearnings of an unusual kind, and Stuart Snelson’s Tasteless, which explores the world of an obsessive food photographer striving for perfection.
And once you’ve cleaned your literary plate, there’s plenty more on the menu here on the website. Tuck in to audio fiction from Fay Franklin and Luke de Castro, involving a star chef with a guilty secret, and a noirish approach to pancake-making, as well as our online-exclusive Ones To Watch stories, featuring everything from sun-eating to sinister sweet-shops. Just don’t spoil your appetite …
Bon appetit – and have a great Christmas.
About Katy Darby
A short-story writer and novelist, Katy was Editor of Litro Magazine from 2010 to June 2012, and is currently Online Short Fiction Editor. Katy studied English at Oxford University and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, where she received the David Higham Award. Her work has won several prizes, been read on BBC Radio, and appeared in various magazines and anthologies including Stand, Mslexia, London Magazine and the Fish & Arvon anthologies. Her first novel, originally titled The Whores' Asylum (Feb 2012), is The Unpierced Heart (Sep 2012), published by Penguin. Besides writing, she teaches Short Story Writing, Novel Writing, and a writers' workshop at City University. She also co-founded and currently runs the monthly live fiction reading event Liars' League.