Hangover reading with Kingsley Amis
Excerpting Kingsley Amis’ Everyday Drinking at length in any discussion thereof is both crucial and inadequate: crucial because nothing anyone could say about it would be as entertaining as the text itself, and inadequate because the only way to convey how consistently funny it is would be to reproduce the book verbatim.
In their persistent [...]
Tea with Muriel Spark (and not Dostoyevsky)
Muriel Spark’s 1992 autobiography has been characterized as purse-lipped, sterile, and withholding, a manipulative account designed to settle scores and divert attention from anything unflattering.
Curriculum Vitae may be more factual than confessional, but judged on its own terms rather than by the standards of the contemporary tell-all, the book is a charming, idiosyncratic, [...]
Kate Christensen celebrates the holidays in Tuscany
Novelist Kate Christensen, who’s been in Tuscany this fall, sends holiday greetings, and a recipe for persimmon pudding.
Hello from Tuscany, which contrary to all the books and movies turns out to be a gated-community-type suburban enclave, staggeringly beautiful as advertised, but very quiet except for the madly honking, bat-out-of-hell drivers on the narrow walled roads. [...]
Recession cooking with MFK Fisher
My only complaint about MFK Fisher’s delightfully bossy How to Cook a Wolf, a hard-times cooking manual first published in 1942, is that it has given me something new to worry about doing wrong: boiling water.
“It can be said,” Fisher admits, “with few people to argue the point, that water boils when it has [...]
Writers and steaks and frazzled eggs
I intend to try Alex Balk’s method of cooking a fucking steak, although I’m pretty sure the first principle of the native Texan’s catechism is “use a grill.” I don’t think you’re even allowed to call it steak in my mother’s house if it wasn’t cooked over an open flame (or maybe chicken-fried). For another [...]
Ford Madox Ford’s Xmas Provençal chicken
This year, instead of a tree, we decorated Max’s beloved pole lamp. He calls the result a “3-way collision between Festivus austerity, Xmas kitsch, and midcentury modernism.”
I call it, “We can take all that down on the 1st, right?”
Christmas Day was an intimate and jolly affair. Joseph brought his cornbread-sausage-fennel stuffing and [...]
Theoretical turkey antidote: Crews’ rattlesnake steaks
Something I learned this Thanksgiving, and really should have known or at least researched beforehand: a 19-pound turkey for seven people is ridiculous, ridiculous overkill, especially when one of those people is a vegetarian. The past few days have been punctuated by ever-more-creative (and unappetizing) turkey concoctions, and endless naps.
Today, in search [...]
Jessa Crispin’s Irish brown soda bread
Has anyone done more in the past six years to foster reading than Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin? What started as a blog and monthly magazine written and edited on the clock at Planned Parenthood has grown into a full-time gig that leaves Crispin plenty of time to read, to write about reading, and to [...]
Lizzie Skurnick’s Fine Lines and salade nicoise
Lizzie Skurnick, poet, YA novelist, critic, and longtime (in blog years) friend to MaudNewton.com, will be publishing a book based on her marvelous Fine Lines, a weekly Jezebel column in which she takes “a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books” she loved in her youth.
I’ve been sitting on [...]
Duncan Murrell’s mad seafood gumbo
It’s been almost three years since Hurricane Katrina, so you don’t hear much about New Orleans these days. After all, the whole painful rebuilding (and, unbelievably, collections) saga doesn’t make for a sexy news hour, and you wouldn’t want anything to get in the way of Anderson Cooper’s ability to spend two months asking [...]
Jack Pendarvis’ sausage and peppers
The delightful Jack Pendarvis, author of Your Body is Changing and fellow fan of Peter DeVries, lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where he’s the visiting writer-in-residence at Ole Miss. (Look for him next time you’re eating oysters at City Grocery.)
His first novel, Awesome, will be published by MacAdam Cage in July. It’s [...]
Anya Ulinich’s narrator learns to cook American
Anya Ulinich is a writer and artist who moved to Phoenix from Russia at 17 and ended up in Brooklyn.
Her recipe contribution (illustrated below) appears in her entertaining first novel, Petropolis, which was published last fall. The protagonist’s mail order fiancee teaches her to make this uniquely American delicacy — [...]
Jim y Nuvia Ruland’s mighty Irish tamale
Jim Ruland is a writer and occasional NPR contributor, and the founder of Los Angeles’ beloved Vermin on the Mount reading series. In 2004 he attended Dublin’s centennial Bloomsday celebration, and somehow remained sober enough to write about the festivities for The Believer.
Below he shares his and his wife Nuvia’s St. Patrick’s Day tradition-in-the-making: [...]
Pia Z. Ehrhardt’s hand-me-down coffee cake
My friend Pia Z. Ehrhardt first published in webzines. She quickly developed a legion of online fans and started winning prizes. Last year MacAdam Cage published her debut collection, Famous Fathers and Other Stories. At the moment she’s working on Speeding in the Driveway, a novel set in New Orleans, where she lives. [...]
Kate Christensen’s cure for the common cold
Day two home from work with a killer cold, and my only consolation is novelist Kate Christensen’s hot toddy. Since she passed it along last fall, the drink has eclipsed spicy tomato soup as the Maud household’s preferred remedy. It proves — as we always knew deep in our hearts — that Bourbon cures [...]
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