In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in early American cooking, fueled, ironically, by advances in technology. Online digital projects such as Feeding America at Michigan State University have made it possible for... Read More

The vast majority of the hundreds of books about sushi available to readers in English seek to simplify the complexities of this cuisine. This author assumes that his readers are already fairly knowledgeable and are regulars at their... Read More

Deep-fried Twinkies. Yes, deep-fried Twinkies. That’s just one of the more, um, exotic recipes that can be found in this book. While ostensibly a cookbook, this ring-bound volume is actually a celebration of the culture that has... Read More

This book belongs to an earlier generation of literary criticism, one that is too often undervalued today. The author takes as her intellectual foundation that “writers’ lives are not always particularly interesting; knowledge of... Read More

When a biographer (or, in this case, biographers) undertakes to write the life of a person who is already the subject of previous works, it is usually either the result of a discovery of a new cache of documents, or because the... Read More

Readers whose only exposure to Herman Melville was an assigned reading of Moby Dick in college may be surprised to learn that Melville also wrote poetry. Almost certainly, some of those same readers wish that their professor had assigned... Read More

In the introduction, Whitman scholar Robert MacIssac describes this book as “a dialogue of truth.” Less metaphorically, it is a three-part, two-person dramatization. The author is a poet and editor who founded the literary magazine,... Read More

A common witticism proclaims that every Southern work of fiction has to contain a dead mule. There are no dead mules in this year’s collection of Southern stories, but there is a picture of a mule on the cover, which may be a joke on... Read More