"Very funny, very stylish and very moving. Teresa Präauer is a novelist of unusual elegance and charm - who can make the reader sadly aware of time passing even while leaving them delightedly hungry"-- Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future
"Deliciously unsettling and thoroughly enjoyable. It's so much fun to see this meticulously planned dinner party go wrong" -- Aysegül Savas, author of The Anthropologists
"Astute observations on the absurd theatre of aspirational living in the age of social media abound in Teresa Präauer's Cooking in the Wrong Century. Culture, under Präauer's gaze, is a mood that can be blurred by candlelight and the Thelonious Monk Septet: it's irresistible, disorienting" ― New Statesman
"Clever, amusing and delightfully compact. To be consumed in one sitting, it pairs wonderfully with a glass or four of fizz" ― Daily Mail
"Every fear you've ever had about hosting a dinner party crops up in this half dream, half choose-your-own-adventure, in which the events of the evening are affected by minor differences: which guests arrive first, and which are late? Who has had a drink on the way? Do they take their shoes off at the door? The characters' conversation follows similar strange, winding tangents to the surreal narrative. Get the crémant open" ― GQ
"Astute, witty and as pleasurable as a case of Crémant. An irresistible novel - I loved it" -- Claire Powell, author of At the Table
‘Teresa Präauer's cookery book ’Kochen im falschen Jahrhundert‘ should be just as successful as Ottolenghi's cookery books’ - Denis Scheck, SWR lesenswert Quartett
"An illustration of the gentrification of one's own heart (...) I was incredibly fascinated by the diction and precision of observation". - Samira El Ouassil, SWR lesenswert Quartett
"This text is truly a work of art; every word is in its place. (...) I literally gorged myself on this language" - Lisa Kreißler, NDR Kultur
"Kochen im falschen Jahrhundert" strikes a balance between a realistic sketch of a milieu and a demystifying satire (...). But what's really interesting here is on a formal level (...) It's an artificial game in which the different variations fit into each other and interweave through repetition and repetition" - Frank Schäfer, taz.am wochenende
The novel of an evening and an invitation to dinner. Full of recipes for a successful life and an unsuccessful evening, which always starts anew; clever, funny, cheerful, at the same time accompanied by the sometimes subliminal and sometimes quite openly articulated aggressions of the people involved. In conversations, the hosting couple and their guests discuss very important and marginal issues, covering the range from foodporn images on the internet to cooking, shopping and living as social practices.
Increasingly, the evening becomes more comical, more tragic, more erotic – negotiating individual current terms, while the hostess is not particularly talented at hosting and repeatedly feels transported to the wrong cent ury. Along the way, a history of goods, food and cooking is told anecdotally.
