Latest news with #DariaLavelle
Epoch Times
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
Author Daria Lavelle's Novel ‘Aftertaste': Check Please
Depending on what you like in literature, 'Aftertaste' by Daria Lavelle is either a unique speculative culinary-lit experience or a wrong turn into a back alley New York bistro that was better left alone. Definitely an acquired taste. To be fair, it begins quite well. The story starts by following the childhood of Konstantin 'Kostya' Duhovny, a poor, awkward New York City kid who lost his Russian immigrant father at a very young age. His last words to his father were those of disgust and scorn; he tells his father the family should have stayed back in the old country where Kostya could've been a chef, instead of a pathetic bus driver in America.
Irish Independent
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Daria Lavelle: ‘There's just something about a character driven wholly by love that makes him indelible'
Born in Kyiv and raised near New York, Daria Lavelle is a writer of speculative fiction. Her short stories have been featured in various online publications, and her debut novel, Aftertaste – about a chef whose food brings spirits back for one last meal with their loved ones – has just been published by Bloomsbury.
Irish Times
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle: A brash novel about early 2000s New York that finds treasure in the trash
Aftertaste Author : Daria Lavelle ISBN-13 : 978-1526683946 Publisher : Bloomsbury Guideline Price : £16.99 Ukrainian-American Daria Lavelle's debut novel is a tale of love, loss and horror set against the freakish backdrop of Manhattan's dining scene. Kostya is a chef who can taste the food dead people desire, which he re-creates for ghosts to share with the ones that mourn them. As with many underworld ventures, things go amiss. Already, Aftertaste has summoned quite a stir, with a movie in the works. There's Stephen King in this novel's ancestry, in style as well as scares. Like King, Lavelle is unabashed that her prose can be clumsy and cliched – 'orgasmic eating experience', 'the perfect, crispy crackle of golden fried chicken skin'. What matters is momentum. Lavelle's writing pounds with bada-boom dialogue and the kind of adrenaline found in an over-heated kitchen during service. In the way she uses brands and celebrities as descriptors, Lavelle evokes Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho. About one Russian kingpin, she writes: 'While his accent was goofy, all Rocky and Bullwinkle … his face was early-era Brad Pitt, the rest of him in an Armani underwear ad, his confidence reeking with too much cologne.' Just as Ellis never escapes the 1980s, Lavelle's New York, although purportedly present-day, is mired in the early aughts. Macho chefs and hidden speakeasies abound; the East Village is still cool, and Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential very much alive. There's a banquet featuring ingredients that once upon a time might have induced gasps – the endangered songbird ortolan, the potentially lethal fugu fish. Kostya's love interest Maura is by-the-book retro, a manic-pixie dream girl with purple hair. READ MORE Is Afterlife sometimes sloppy and occasionally bad? Perhaps, but to read it is a rush. Besides, one should be suspicious of someone who disdains all junk, be it a McDonald's French fry or Real Housewives marathon. As an elegy to a city where garbage and greatness go hand in hand, it's only appropriate to find a little trash in Aftertaste's soul.
CBS News
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
"Aftertaste" by Daria Lavelle voted the first book of summer for Club Calvi!
We may receive commissions from some links to products on this page. Promotions are subject to availability and retailer terms. Please consider joining our Facebook group by CLICKING HERE. Find out more about the books below. Club Calvi's new book explores the power of food to link life and afterlife Club Calvi has a new book! We asked you to decide on our next read and you voted "Aftertaste" as the Readers' Choice. In a message to readers, author Daria Lavelle said the book follows a chef whose food can bring spirits back from the afterlife for a last meal with their loved ones. He opens a New York City restaurant that serves closure. He doesn't expect to fall in love or to cause chaos in the afterlife in the process. You can read an excerpt and get the book below and read along with Club Calvi over the next four weeks. The CBS New York Book Club focuses on books connected to the Tri-State Area in their plots and/or authors. The books may contain adult themes. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Aftertaste" by Daria Lavelle Simon & Schuster From the publisher: Konstantin Duhovny is a haunted man. His father died when he was ten, and ghosts have been hovering around him ever since. Kostya can't exactly see the ghosts, but he can taste their favorite foods. Flavors of meals he's never eaten will flood his mouth, a sign that a spirit is present. Kostya has kept these aftertastes a secret for most of his life, but one night, he decides to act on what he's tasting. And everything changes. Kostya discovers that he can reunite people with their deceased loved ones—at least for the length of time it takes them to eat a dish that he's prepared. He thinks his life's purpose might be to offer closure to grieving strangers, and sets out to learn all he can by entering a particularly fiery ring of Hell: the New York culinary scene. But as his kitchen skills catch up with his ambitions, Kostya is too blind to see the catastrophe looming in the Afterlife. And the one person who knows Kostya must be stopped also happens to be falling in love with him. Daria Lavelle lives in New Jersey. "Aftertaste" By Daria Lavelle (ThriftBooks) $22 Excerpt: "Aftertaste" by Daria Lavelle BITTER The first time Konstantin Duhovny tasted something he hadn't actually eaten he was eleven, seated on the edge of the public pool in Brighton Beach, his heels churning grey water into foam. He was watching the backs of the other boys—the ones he was supposed to be swimming with, but who never invited him, even out of politeness, into their circle—as they splashed about, showing off handstands and lung capacities, spouting chlorinated water a foot into the air like porpoises. He watched them all afternoon—Mitya and Sasha and Misha K. and Misha B. (whom they kept calling Bear because of the thick, black hair up and down his back)—until, one by one, their fathers finished their waterlogged Russkaya Reklamas, scratched their nipples through threadbare white undershirts, and peeled their pasty bodies from the rubber loungers, signaling quitting time. Kostya had come chaperoned by his cousin Valerik—not his real cousin, but the teenage son of Tetya Natasha, not his real aunt but an acquaintance of his mother's—who had promptly dumped him when his girlfriend whispered something about a kissing booth at the boardwalk nearby. Don't you move, Valerik had hissed at Kostya. I'll be back. That had been two hours ago. As the last boy, Mitya, raised the handle of the chain-link fence, Kostya felt himself blister with jealousy. There was no one to ferry him home, just like there had been no one to slather sunblock onto his back—which he could already feel was red and tight and burnt—and just like there would be no one to teach him how to talk to these boys in a way that made it clear that he was one of them. But then, of course, he wasn't one of them. Their fathers were alive. He kicked faster at the water, kicked violently, kicked at the fathers and sons, kicked at the great cavity of longing inside himself, this way of missing someone, missing them desperately, missing every part including those he'd never known, a pocket so deep he thought that if he could only reach inside of it, worry its lining long enough, break through it to the other side, to where empty could grow full as a belly round with food, he might just find what he was looking for. Right then, something traveled across his tongue, and Kostya stopped kicking. It coated the inside of his mouth, thick as paste, the taste—the uneaten taste—overpowering. It was savory, salty, the texture mealy, slightly sweet and fatty, something tart, barely, and then, at the tail, in the back of his throat, bitter, bitter, blooming like a bruise. Good, but also bad, just a little bit like s***. He wondered briefly whether one of the boys had found a way to make him ingest a turd—it seemed the sort of thing that boys with fathers could do to a boy without one—but just as quickly, the sensation vanished. Kostya smacked his lips, trying to call it back, but there was nothing left now, only a warmth spreading slowly across his tongue as he choked back tears. It was only in the absence of the taste that he suddenly recognized what it had been. Chicken liver, sautéed onions, fresh dill garnish, squeeze of lemon. Pechonka. His father's favorite dish, according to his mother, who invoked it infrequently and had stopped making it after he died. Kostya had never tasted pechonka. He just knew, like an instinct, like another sense he'd only now become conscious of, that the ghost of that dish—not its taste, but its aftertaste—had just been inside of his mouth, spirited there by the person who most longed to taste it again. From AFTERTASTE. Copyright © 2025 by Daria Lavelle. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Return to the top of page
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle review – what exactly is ‘clairgustance'?
Reading Aftertaste, I found myself wondering how readers visualised novels before the age of cinema. Now we all have a set of preformed mental images of things we might never have seen – or won't ever see – in real life, from plane crashes to zombie apocalypses. Sometimes, a novel comes along with a climactic scene that's so exact a fit for a particular movie's aesthetic (Ghostbusters, in this case: we're talking angry spooks! SFX! Manhattan!) that it's practically an extension of the franchise. Daria Lavelle's debut is an amalgamation of hypermodern satire, slushy romance and savvy cultural allusion that is as vigorously brought together as its lead character's recipes. Konstantin 'Kostya' Duhovny has been plagued since childhood with a strange affliction. Tastes he has never experienced invade his mouth. He seems to be having other people's food memories. But whose? A lowly restaurant dishwasher, he has a big advantage over the other kitchen serfs: pinning down these evanescent flavours has given him a huge repertoire of tastes and techniques, fast-tracking his culinary skills, and soon he is rising in New York's haute restaurant scene. When he recreates a cocktail he has fleetingly tasted, a ghost appears, sending Kostya in panic to a psychic, who luckily turns out to be a beautiful young woman. Goth girl Maura offers a diagnosis: what he suffers from is clairgustance, which allows him to taste the favourite foods of the departed, connecting him with the dead. As movie lore dictates, Maura and Kostya can't link romantically just yet. Dispatching him with a baleful warning never to repeat the experiment, she disappears from the narrative – for now. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Lavelle excels in conjuring the scenes behind the swinging doors, where head chefs hassle, sous chefs hustle and sweating waitstaff barrel in and out. An episode with Kostya meandering glumly through a pretentious sea-themed pop-up nightclub is also terrific in its caustic observation of hipster types. Chapter headings uphold the culinary theme: Mise en Places, Entrée, Backburners, as well as the more intriguing Hard to Swallow and Discomfort Food. Working at Saveur Fare, an El Bulli-style gastrodome, Kostya experiments with menus in spare moments, then opens his own secret supper club, promising punters the chance of a final meeting with a departed loved one. Sometimes full materialisation ensues, sometimes it doesn't, but a mystery investor gets wind and offers an upgrade: Kostya's own restaurant. Interpolated passages in italics represent the banter of an overeager tour guide to 'The Konstantin Duhovny Culinary Experience' ('All right! How we doing? Getting a taste for our guy's secret sauce?'). The moment when we twig just who is leading the tour is expertly timed. Maura and Kostya soon reconnect, but it's strange that someone who can write so scathingly about the sillier aspects of modern life can also come up with dialogue like this: 'No! Konstantin, that isn't – that might be how it started, but it isn't how it stayed! I fell for you. It would have been so much easier if I hadn't.' Hungry spirits are now jostling for attention and the veil between worlds is fraying. There has already been a sneaky reference to Ghostbusters, and sentences such as 'A waiter slipped behind a thick velvet curtain, only to be driven out by a cackling ghost' suggest that Bill Murray and crew will charge through the door at any moment. But the novel is seasoned with plenty of imagination, pathos and novelty: it even updates the famous literary principle of Chekhov's gun in foodie terms, but I won't spoil that particular innovation. Aftertaste pulls together familiar elements of romance and the supernatural, adding a dash of Anthony Bourdain-style bullishness and a pinch of Davelle's own authorial smarts. I'll bet there's a run on fleur de sel right after publication day. Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
