The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak

Advance praise for

The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak
A New Orleans Family Memoir

By Randy Fertel

"The Gorilla Man and The Empress of Steak is that rare memoir that manages to be both intimately personal and yet of broad appeal. For it is truly the portrait of a generation, even as it brings vividly to life a panoply of individual characters in New Orleans. They may be black or white or creole; they may be male or female. But all fill the reader with joy and wonder, and a fair share of tears as well. Beautifully written, affectionate, witty, this book tugs us from one cover to the other."

- David H. Lynn, editor, The Kenyon Review

"Who better to deliver the strange soul of New Orleans, a city we can't live without, than Randy Fertel? Ruth and Rodney's child, who suffered and gloried terribly at their hands, is only New Orleans's latest beautiful family memoirist."

- Paul Hendrickson, author of Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott and The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War

"A giant jambalaya of a book that throws into the pot a huge variety of ingredients that surprise, delight, burn the tongue, sear the heart, make you laugh until you cry-and beg for more. With candor and courage, the author does more than spill the beans of a highly eccentric family. He makes those beans as characteristic of the flavor of New Orleans as any of its wild and crazy stews. His triumph, as a writer obsessed with history, is to have turned the story of his own disastrous family into the story of the city itself."

- Betty Fussell, author of My Kitchen Wars, The Story of Corn, and Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef.

"I just finished reading the Earner piece, and it is indeed fabulous. I just love it! It's such a great snapshot of her, so funny, and also miraculously captivating. It's just wonderful. Is this going to be in your book, or is it a separate piece altogether? Thanks for sending it along. It's just wonderful."

- Susan Orlean

"His mother was the ‘first lady of American restaurants.' His father was ‘odd, self-centered, and nuts.' Randy Fertel leverages a raucous New Orleans upbringing, in which Salvador Dali and Edwin Edwards play bit parts, to tell the story of an uncommon American family, defined, in equal measure, by bold swagger and humbling vulnerabilities."

- John T. Edge, series editor, Cornbread Nation: The Best of Southern Food Writing

"This wonderfully affecting family memoir is a well-told tale of personalized social history, but ever so much more than that. It is a sentient evocation of the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and feel of New Orleans and its sprawling interface with the mighty river and gulf that are its hope and despair, its inescapable fate. Drawing from two hundred years of his family's thrive-and-survive presence on the lip of a watery grave, Fertel gives us a palpable sense of its essence-as close as you can get without living there yourself."

- John Egerton

"Randy Fertel's soulful southern storytelling captures you instantly. I love how he uses the lens of family and food to tell the rich, complex history of New Orleans."

- Alice Waters

"Ambition, abandonment, revenge, the Napoleonic code, broken promises, gorillas, bad contracts, evil intentions, and lawsuits never-ending; they're all here in Randy Fertel's feast of a memoir, served with a healthy side of New Orleans history, and, for dessert, ville flottante! Balzac would be envious, Tennessee Williams would feel right at home."

- Valerie Martin

Funny, smart, poignant, and richly redolent of New Orleans, Randy Fertel's The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is a brilliant memoir by a very talented writer indeed.

- Robert Olen Butler

'With unsparing honesty and love, Randy Fertel unravels the mystery of his eccentric, legendary parents. The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is by turns wry and sad, hilarious and heartbreaking, but always, always delectable.'

- Stewart O'Nan, author of Emily, Alone