Recipes from the Dump

By Abigail Stone

Book Overview

In a totally original first novel that's as American as Whitney Otto's How to Make an American Quilt, as satisfying as Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, Stone tells the story of a woman's hunt for the essential ingredients in a cluttered world, a mock cookbook for our culture.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393038548
• ISBN13: 9780393038545
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Length: 271 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 1.0" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

I love this book

I read this book years ago when my sister sent it to me as a gift. I kept wondering what it was about and feeling a little frustrated though interested. I remember when I finished it I thought oh I loved this book!, Bought it again recently and loved it from the beginning. It's not for everyone, but it's an honest, creative, sometimes moving and very, very funny trip into the mind and life of of a single mom. Loved it.

Timely Account of the Iraq War

I picked up this book recently and could not put it down. Reading thru the night I was struck by the accounts of the Iraq war in Bush seniors time as president. It stands today and has a powerful impact on the reader. Gabby is a REAL charactor, not like the perfect heroines in most other novels. She is deep and she is funny in the same sentence. I rate this one of the best books I've read in a long time. What else has Abigaiul Stone written?

Brilliant and Humorous, this book posesses a rare wit

This book really surprised me with it's rough beauty. Gabby's unparalleled wit, inquisitive mind, and love of Shakespeare makes her one of the most vivid characters I have read. Money and talent are not the same thing, nor is cleanliness and intellect. I appreciated this book because it was real and honest and shows a woman who is both a well-read intellectual and a penniless dreamer. I hope to see more of Abigail Stone, because as an avid critic and member of several book clubs, I find the characters in Recipes are bursting with color and the author just can't write a bad line. Highly recommended to bookclubs.

a funny, wonderful story about a single mother

Recipes from the dump is one of the best books I have ever read. Abigail Stone writes with such passion and truth. She portrays everything a singel mother must deal with, struggeling with every day life with three children. Within the book she adds recipes for the mind in a humours way. I have read this book many times and never get tierd of reading it, my frinds agree it is a wonderful masterpeice, never before have I seen such a strong women.

This is a wonderful poetic little book

I just loved this book! I think it is a bitter sweet portrait of what it is like to be a single mother with no husband or high powered career. I especially liked her surrealistic recipes, they read like poetry to me.

thoughtful, musical writing ...a great read!

Look among recent paperbacks for Abigail Stone's Recipes from the Dump (Avon Books, 1995). Her main character, Gabby Fulbriten, speaks to us in a series of observations that are by turns droll, despairing, funny, and hopeful. Gabby is the person you might see working the supermarket cash register, with whom you might share an occasional moment of sympathy or irony. She openly longs to meet a Mr. Right, frets about her weight, laments the hurts done to the earth, needs more time. She lives in an old house by the Leadbelly, Vermont town dump. We come to know and like Gabby by way of her connections with the neighborhood, children, the earth. Much of the first-person narrative focuses on these connections, and on the daily flow of life in Gabby's world. It' s the world of a poor single mother, and includes glimpses of despair, as well as mystery and humor. In her precise and melodic voice, Stone makes of these elements a story we want to share and of Gabby, a person we want to know. The narrative's rhythm is marked by Gabby's recipes, a few of which may even be edible. Try her Recipe for a Man, or her Just Desserts; just be sure to top it off with her Life Juice. Bill Bric