ENTERTAINING DISASTERS:  A Novel (with Recipes) (Counterpoint)

Reader’s Prize Pick, 2009, Elle Magazine

Nancy Spiller is a writer and artist living on the wild western edge of Los Angeles with her husband and their dog. A third generation California native, she grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and received her B.A. in English from San Francisco State University. She was a staff feature writer at the San Jose Mercury News and its Sunday magazine, West, before she moved to Los Angeles and worked as a staff feature writer at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and as editor of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate’s Entertainment News Service. Her essays and articles have appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, Mother Jones, Town & Country, USA Weekend, McCall’s, Cooking Light and Salon.com. Her short fiction has been published in the Rain City Review and her illustrated texts have graced the pages of Arroyo. Her critically acclaimed debut novel ENTERTAINING DISASTERS: A Novel (with Recipes) was published by Counterpoint Press in January, 2009.

Praise for ENTERTAINING DISASTERS

“[Entertaining Disasters] offers sharp, startling observations in a unique and very human voice.” –Elle

“It will make you appreciate your own fallen soufflés all that much more.” –Redbook.

“With deftness and wit, Nancy Spiller delivers needle-sharp insights…while portraying the dissolution of a family and the rise of longing for a culinary salvation.” –Janet Fitch, author, White Oleander and Painted Black.

“Her borderline stream-of-consciousness, tangential terror splits into fascinating diversions about food and food history, and ultimately, about herself. Her past gradually emerges, pulled from silence by a smell, a taste, a touch or a memory of a particular ingredient. Now, at midlife, she is ready to examine the list of her own ingredients: who she is and what she wants.” –Book Page

A recommended read in Ladies Home Journal, OK and Coastal Living.