Milk Fed, Paperback/Melissa Broder

This darkly hilarious and "delicious new novel that ravishes with sex and food" ( The Boston Globe ) from the acclaimed author of The Pisces and So Sad Today is a "precise blend of desire, discomfort, spirituality, and existential ache" ( BuzzFeed ). Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, through obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting--until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting. Rachel soon meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam--by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family--and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey. "A ruthless, laugh-out-loud examination of life under the tyranny of diet culture" ( Glamour ) Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is "riotously funny and perfectly profane" ( Refinery 29 ) from "a wild, wicked mind" ( Los Angeles Times ). About author(s): Melissa Broder is the author of the novel The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today and four poetry collections, including Last Sext . She has written for The New York Times , Elle.com, VICE, Vogue Italia , and New York magazine's "The Cut." Her poems have appeared in POETRY , The Iowa Review , Tin House, and Guernica , and she is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry. She lives in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter @SoSadToday and @MelissaBroder and Instagram @RealMelissaBroder.