Garner gathers a literary chorus to capture the joys of reading and
eating in this comic, personal classic.
Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and
melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for me,
gone together. The book you're holding is a product of these combined
gluttonies.
Dwight Garner, the beloved New York Times critic and the author of Garner's
Quotations, serves up the intertwined pleasures of books and food. The
product of a lifetime of obsessively reading, eating, and every combination
therein, The Upstairs Delicatessen : On Eating, Reading, Reading About
Eating, and Eating While Reading is a charming, emotional memoir, one that
only Garner could write. In it, he records the voices of great writers and the
stories from his life that fill his mind as he moves through the sections of the
day and this book: breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking,
and dinner.
Through his lifetime obsession with these twin joys, we meet the man behind
the pages and the plates, and a portrait of Garner's life, eager and insatiable,
emerges. He writes with tenderness and humor about his mayonnaise-laden
childhood in West Virginia and Naples, Florida (including his father's famous
peanut butter and pickle sandwich), his mind-opening marriage to a chef from
a foodie family (Cree grew up taking frog's legs to school in her lunch box"),
and the words anddishes closest to his heart. This is a book to be savored,
though it may just whet your appetite for more.
Dwight Garner is a book critic for The New York Times and was previously
the senior editor of The New York Times Book Review . His essays and
criticism have also appeared in The New Republic, Harper's Magazine, Slate,
and other publications. He is the author of Garner's Quotations.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
On Sale: Oct 24/23
5.38 x 8.25 • 240 pages
Index
9780374603427 • $36.00 • CL - With dust jacket
Biography & Autobiography / Culinary