Friday Food Writers: Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd
One of our Thanksgiving dinner guests brought me the most wonderful gift–two gorgeous reprints put out by an amazing press I hadn’t heard of before, Persephone Books in London. According to them, their goal is to publish “forgotten fiction and non-fiction by unjustly neglected authors.” Amen to that. The first of the two books I [...]
Friday Food Writers: Li-Young Lee
I discovered Li-Young Lee in college, when I was obsessed with his second book The City In Which I Love You, the title poem of which still rings in my head on a regular basis (well, lines from it, anyway). He writes a lot about memory and family and Chinese culture, among other things. He [...]
Friday Food Writers: Anthony Doerr
Four Seasons in Rome is novelist Anthony Doerr’s account of the year he spent in Rome (on a Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy–jealous, anyone?) with his wife and twin baby boys, trying to write a book, trying to learn Italian, and often, trying to figure out how to get food for his growing [...]
Friday Food Writers: Julia Child and Avis DeVoto
I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of a fantastic new book of letters between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, the friend and editor who was responsible for shepherding Mastering the Art of French Cooking to a publisher. The two women met when Julia (in what I like to think of as a [...]
Friday Food Writers: EFB (aka me)
Well, the time has come. On this, the day after publication and the day of my first official EFB event (at Greenlight Books in Fort Greene, Brooklyn–come on by if you’re in the neighborhood!), I can’t resist giving you a little glimpse at EFB, the book, recipe included, here on Friday Food Writers. I’ve been [...]
Friday Food Writers: W.S. Merwin
Yesterday came the great news that W.S. Merwin has been appointed our 17th poet laureate. I’ve loved Merwin since I was a teenager. There’s something ethereal about his work that persists even when he’s writing about very physical things, like he’s hovering above the earth. (You can read a review I wrote of one of [...]
Friday Food Writers: Emily Dickinson
I’m on a little Emily tear after reading a new biography of her by Lyndall Gordon. And while I don’t normally think of her as a food person, she did love to garden and bake. At the Folger Library in Washington, D.C. they have a celebration of her birthday every year where her black cake [...]
Friday Food Writers: MFK Fisher
MFK Fisher is a giant among food writers, known for her wit, her clarity of style, her acerbic wonderfulness. It’s almost impossible to choose from her many books and essays, but today I give you a little excerpt from a 1971 piece called “Grandmother’s Nervous Stomach,” in which she discusses the poverty of her grandmother’s [...]
Friday Food Writers: Elizabeth Bishop
I had a different Bishop poem in mind for today, one about coffee and bread and a little bit of magic on a balcony at breakfast time (a fine combination if ever there was one), but leafing through my Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, 1927-1979 I rediscovered this little masterpiece, which I’d forgotten about. It [...]
Friday Food Writers: Farm Writer Edition, Novella Carpenter
I’m working on my next column for Bookforum, which is about urban farmers (including one former drag queen named Aqua….stay tuned!). One of the books I’m reading is about a year old but it’s so good and interesting I’m including it anyway (plus it’s just out in paperback). Novella Carpenter’s Farm City: The Education of [...]
