Sweetbitter: A Novel

"For the poet John Keats, joy was a grape bursting in the mouth: sudden, flooding and sweet. Food and feeling are natural partners; this debut, set in a Manhattan restaurant, is a feast of both. Tess is a backwaiter newly arrived in New York, the one place “large enough to hold so much unbridled, unfocused desire.” Sweetbitter balances on the edge of overwritten, of too much feeling crammed into every sentence. But it works because that is what it feels like to be young and in a big city: like it’s too much, and at the same time not nearly enough."