The Honey Month

by Amal El-Mohtar

Overview

Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Month, with an introduction by Danielle Sucher, ranks among the year’s most exquisite treasures. This beautiful volume of short fictions and poems takes as its inspiration the author's tasting of 28 different kinds of honey, one per day. Each tasting leads to a different literary creation, each entry beginning with a description of the honey in terms that will be familiar to wine connoisseurs: "Day 3--Sag Harbor, NY, Early Spring Honey," which has a color "pale and clear as snowmelt" and the smell "cool sugar crystals," but also brings to mind "a stingless jellyfish I once held in my hand in Oman." The taste? "...like the end of winter...[when] you can still see clumps of snow on the ground and the air is heavy with damp..." The differences between the types of honey allow El-Mohtar to move back and forth between the poetic and the more casually contemporary, with the experiment of the tasting as the unifying structure. A perfect gift, a hidden treasure, a delight for the senses.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013337008
Publisher:	Jeff Vandermeer
Publication date:	09/29/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	654,205
File size:	622 KB

About the Author

Amal El-Mohtar is a first-generation Lebanese-Canadian, currently pursuing a PhD in English literature at the Cornwall campus of the University of Exeter. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in a range of publications both online and in print, including Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, Cabinet des Fées, Sybil's Garage, Mythic Delirium, and Ideomancer; her short fiction has also been broadcast on Podcastle. She won the 2009 Rhysling Award with her poem “Song for an Ancient City,” and co-edits Goblin Fruit, an online quarterly dedicated to fantastical poetry, with Jessica P. Wick.

Editorial Reviews

“As you tuck into Amal El-Mohtar’s The Honey Month, I would recommend having at the ready a big plate of warm crusty bread oozing butter and a few jars of honey
with spoons at the ready. Yes, it will make you that hungry, that desirous of the sticky, glorious stuff...So it is great fun to read Amal’s salute to the glorious stuff in sensual, dreamy works of mythic poetry and short fiction."

Midori Snyder

“Amal El-Mohtar exploded the speculative poetry world like a nova—and here she turns her dream-like attention to prose. Like nothing else you’ve read, The Honey Month is a strange and radiant hybrid of foody passion, sly sensuality, and geeky obsession of the best kind.”

Catherynne M. Valente

“A word-posy for all the senses, a jar of golden windows into worlds: I savoured Amal El Mohtar’s The Honey Month on a wooden honey dipper, stringing out her artful
and chancy stories and poems over days in delicious slow loops of sweetness. The artist of me applauds her painterly skill: the colour of these words is amber-ochre. And I was smitten by the utter sensuousness of this wonderfully flavoursome book.”

Rima Staines