Friday Freebie: A Really Big Lunch by Jim Harrison

Congratulations to Anna Dockter, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: The Last Kid Left by Rosecrans Baldwin.

This week’s contest is for A Really Big Lunch by the late, great Jim Harrison. In addition to being a master maestro with fiction (Legends of the Fall, Returning to Earth, et al), Harrison was a renowned gourmand (a “roving” one according to the book’s subtitle). In his introduction, Mario Batali writes of the very first time he met Harrison--they had a fifteen-course meal together: “Jim was hungry, thirsty, joyously friendly, and characteristically overeager for the first course to come out of the kitchen.” In these pages, Harrison lays it all out on the table (so to speak). The New York Times Book Review called A Really Big Lunch “A culinary combo plate of Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Julian Schnabel, and Sam Peckinpah.” Dig in, my friends...

New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison was one of this country’s most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. He also wrote some of the best essays on food around, earning praise as “the poet laureate of appetite” (Dallas Morning News). A Really Big Lunch, published on the one-year anniversary of Harrison’s death, collects many of his food pieces for the first time--and taps into his larger-than-life appetite with wit and verve. Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in A Really Big Lunch. From the titular New Yorker piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from Brick, Playboy, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews, A Really Big Lunch is shot through with Harrison’s pointed apercus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades. A Really Big Lunch is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.

If you’d like a chance at winning A Really Big Lunch, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on June 15, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on June 16. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.