Institut Ramon LLull

Sustenance is a dictionary that could only have been written by Martí Sales, an author known for his genre-bending. Every entry in this dictionary corresponds to a letter of the alphabet and starts with a question related to food, opening a window onto a somewhat related subject. He talks about hunger, desire, and curiosity, but also about working at the market, love found on a dark street, and Barcelona’s Carmel Hill. In this book we find an encyclopedic history of the potato, a fable on the origins of agriculture, the relationship between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, a poem that paraphrases Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia… Autobiography, essay, narration, erudition, poetry, recipes, history, and literature. Sales mixes together these ingredients to cook up a book that can only be modified by an array of adjectives: voluptuous, life-affirming, hilarious, scholarly, sentimental, Barcelonian, deep… in a word, unclassifiable.