Between the Fish and the Mudcake Writers, Dinners, Cities and Other Diversions

Patrick White misses out on bombe Alaska at a Sydney dinner party while in Adelaide Peter Goldsworthy worries about gazpacho. Georges Perec's ghost haunts an Algerian restaurant in the rue Linni in Paris. In Budapest David Malouf attends a reception in an Irish pub. William Shakespeare is dismembered and consumed by a convocation of scholars in a hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon. Over dinner in an elegant dining room during a Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth Judah Waten muses on the past. Jean Echenoz marvels at the goldfields baroque of the Shamrock Hotel in Bendigo. Jorge Luis Borges is sighted in Buenos Aires. And at a literary dinner in a restored hostelry on the outskirts of Ballarat Miroslav Holub joins other luminaries of the literary world in reading snippets of his work between steamed fish and mudcake.In these reminiscences of writers, books, food, music and places, Andrew Riemer, the author of Inside Outside, The Habsburg Cafi and Sandstone Gothic, surveys three decades of the literary life, and reveals how disaster struck when he ate Tafelspitz, boiled beef, potatoes and horseradish sauce in Vienna.