About The Book

“Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein’s erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy. Balzac uses food and the art of the table as connecting threads in his novels, showing how food can evoke character, atmosphere, class, and social climbing more suggestively than money, appearances, and other more conventional trappings.

Full of surprises and insights, Balzac’s Omelette invites you to taste anew Balzac’s genius as a writer and his deep understanding of the human condition, its ambitions, its flaws, and its cravings.

Ms. Muhlstein’s jewel of a book is a great example for developing writers of how to find a new door into a much-studied, much written about subject, such as the French master Balzac. In fact, she’s bullt an enviable reputation as a biographer on her ability to give a unique intellectual twist on her subjects.

Balzac’s Omelette was translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. Ms. Hunter studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated some 40 books including works by Agnès Desarthe, Amélie Nothomb, Frédéric Beigbeder, Véronique Ovaldé, and Catherine Millet, and has been short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize twice. She lives in Norfolk, England.

About The Author

Anka Muhlstein began writing when she settled in New York in 1974. Since then, she has created a notable career as a biographer with attention to details and unique approaches to her subject matter, pulling in her readers with appeals to their intellect instead of efforts to impress them with voluminous footnotes and the physical weight of a book. She was awarded the Goncourt Prize in 1996 for her biography of The Marquis de Custine, Letters from Russia, and has twice received the History Prize of the French Academy.

Other bestselling books by Ms. Muhlstein in translation include:
Astolphe de Custine : The Last French Aristocrat
Baron James: The Rise of the French Rothschilds
Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart: The Perils of Marriage
LA Salle: Explorer of the North American Frontier
Memoirs of the Comtesse De Boigne: 1781-1815
Memoirs of the Comtesse De Boigne: 1816-1830
A Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe De Custine
Venice for Lovers with her husband, Louis Begley

Ms. Muhlstein lives in New York with her husband, a lawyer and novelist, author of
eight novels, all originally published by Alfred A. Knopf and since re-issued by Ballantine Books.
His novels are:
Wartime Lies
The Man Who Was Late
As Max Saw It
About Schmidt
Mistler’s Exit
Schmidt Delivered
Shipwreck
Matters of Honor