Deer Hunting in Paris: A Memoir of God, Guns, and Game Meat

What happens when a Korean-American preacher's kid refuses to get married, travels the world, and quits being vegetarian? She meets her polar opposite on an online dating site while sitting at a caf in Paris, France and ends up in Paris, Maine, learning how to hunt. A memoir and a cookbook with recipes that skewer human foibles and celebrates DIY food culture, Deer Hunting in Paris is an unexpectedly funny exploration of a vanishing way of life in a complex cosmopolitan world. Sneezing madly from hay fever, Lee recovers her roots in rural Maine by running after a headless chicken, learning how to sight in a rifle, shooting skeet, and butchering animals. Along the way, she figures out how to keep her boyfriend's conservative Republican family from "mistaking" her for a deer and shooting her at the clothesline.

Paula Lee is a food writer, architectural historian, and backwoods cook. She is the author of ＂Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse,＂ ＂Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective,＂ and ＂Game: A Global History,＂ in press. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University, and other institutions.