Melanie Rehak

Bookforum

If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” So goes the famous William Morris quotation. A great many domestic possessions, of course, are either one or the other. But the world seems short on things that are both. Among my own small trove, I count a wristwatch that belonged to my late father...

Bookforum

“This is the Seinfeld cookbook,” Mike Solomonov explained to me earlyish one morning not too long ago. “It’s about nothing.” We were standing in the original Federal Donuts shop, which he and four partners opened in the low-slung, residential, and decidedly uncool Pennsport neighborhood of South Philadelphia in 2011. Sunlight streamed in through a plate-glass window emblazoned with the company’s red rooster logo...

Bookforum

In 1979, Werner Herzog made good on a promise to eat his shoe. A few years earlier, Errol Morris, a protégé of Herzog’s in Berkeley, California, had been struggling to finish his first film. Herzog promised that if Morris got it done, he’d consume some footwear. Morris ultimately delivered Gates of Heaven, the documentary about the pet-cemetery business that launched his career; Herzog, true to his word, entered the kitchen with a pair of leather boots.

Bookforum

Protein powder stirred into diet orange soda. Milk pudding with a touch of voodoo mixed in. Thick hunks of gingerbread, boiled bacon with broad beans, “Shrimp Wiggle,” and oceans of champagne. These are just some examples of the food and drink that pop up in Laura Shapiro’s new book, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories (Viking, $27).

Bookforum

Agnostics and atheists rejoice! If the holiday season brings out in you, as it occasionally does in me, a nagging undercurrent of regret that there is no higher order giving weight to your festivities, Taschen books understands. Its reissue of Salvador Dalí's 1973 cookbook, Les Dîners de Gala ($60), filled with lavish recipes and images that frequently verge on the disturbing,

Bookforum

Spoiler alert: I made the Big Fucking Steak. Of course I did. Because of all the recipes in Anthony Bourdain’s new cookbook, Appetites (Ecco, $38), it has the most Bourdainian recipe title, stamped in huge letters at the top of the page and preceded by a photo spread of an enormous dog in profile, jaws wide open and teeth glistening, about to pounce on a piece of raw meat.

Bookforum

Deuki Hong is throwing chunks of butter into a giant wok. It’s a late afternoon in December, and we’re in the kitchen of the restaurant Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong, on Thirty-second Street in Manhattan, making kimchi fried rice. Already in the wok are pork belly, onion, kimchi, and cooked rice. The hissing noise the mixture makes as Hong flattens it down with the back of a huge ladle is epic, louder than the music blaring...

The Times Literary Supplement

It’s the rare child in the English-speaking world who makes it to adulthood without having some version of the maxim “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow” pressed upon them. Though Dan Barber never actually cites this hoary phrase in his new book, The Third Plate: Field notes on the future of food, he nonetheless makes its sentiment resonate anew for adults. 

Bookforum

Most of the people who saw the 2009 film Julie & Julia agreed: It would have been better if it were simply Julia. (Indeed, one fan, who happened to be a film editor, was heralded as a hero vigilante when he posted a Julie Powell–free version of the movie called & Julia online.)

Bookforum

The holidays are fast approaching as I write this column, bringing the usual flurry of thoughts about what to cook for the rush of upcoming festive dinners. Whatever delicacies appear on my table (along with the family recipes that have been grandfathered in despite their dependence on canned soups), they’re guaranteed to be pretty different from what I, and everybody else in America, was making in the kitchen twenty years...

Bookforum

Long before I had any idea that Laurie Colwin was a food writer, I loved her writing about food. I discovered it not in the articles she wrote for Gourmet and other magazines, starting in the ’80s, but in her fiction, each volume of which, if I may borrow one of her titles, is another marvelous thing.

In the autumn of 2007, I moderated a panel at the New York Public Library called “Julia Child in America.” Its subject was Child’s ongoing and outsize effect on American cooking and food culture. It had been convened on the occasion of a new biography of Child written by one of the panelists, the estimable food historian Laura Shapiro. The other participants were no less expert and engaging: chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, food writer David Kamp, and cookbook author, editor, and FOJ (friend of Julia) Molly O’Neill.

Bookforum

Some years ago, when my first child was finally old enough to sit through a book that (a) was not made of cardboard and (b) had more than four words on a page, I raided the bookshelves of my childhood bedroom with glee. Narrative, at last! All my old favorites were there—the Wizard of Oz books, The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, In the Night Kitchen.

Bookforum

“This is the topsy-turvy world of luxurious toil,” Max Watman writes in Harvest: Field Notes from a Far-Flung Pursuit of Real Food, his new book about his adventures with—oh, how I’ve come to dread this phrase—real food. He’s describing his preparation of a foraged meal during a recent summer vacation, which began with him making salt from seawater, because “what could be more guttural, more intrinsically oceanic than the ocean’s salt?”

Bookforum

I have always been inordinately fond of things with moving parts—pinball machines, record players, those clocks and watches in which you can see the gears and sprockets turning as the seconds tick away. As such, one of my great regrets in life is that I was born in Manhattan after the heyday of the Automat. That combination of food and simple machinery is like a holy grail for me.

Bookforum

Some years ago, I heard a fantastic story about Andy Warhol attending a banquet for wealthy Manhattan art patrons sometime in the 1960s. The tables were laden with all manner of delicacies—caviar, pâtés, the works.

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“I wanted to rent a lion, but they said the insurance was too much,” Eddie Huang told me, offhandedly, one chilly afternoon late last year. We were discussing the four-minute TED talk he’s preparing to deliver at the organization’s annual conference this February, “I Dreamt of White Lions.”

Bookforum

The holidays, their excesses, and the absolution of those excesses in the unblemished promise of the new year are nigh upon us. As such, I feel the need to come clean about something that seems especially timely: I am a fruitcake proselytizer. What’s more, I have successfully converted a rather large number of previously fruitcake-despising people—and they are legion—to my faith.

Bookforum

It all began with the Los Angeles kimchi taco truck. Rumors of this previously unimaginable and yet obviously brilliant invention began to float into our Brooklyn home from the West Coast sometime in 2009. My husband, a native Angeleno—and thus a taco snob— as well as a kimchi fanatic, immediately began trying to find a reason to fly out to the City of Angels as soon as possible.

Bookforum

In 1941, M. F. K. Fisher famously considered the oyster. To her many thoughts on how, when, where, and why to eat it, she added this little excursion into its amorous dimensions: “The love-life of an oyster is a curious one, dependent on the vagaries of temperature and the tides,” she mused.

Bookforum

Memo to the Powers That Be:

When I die, I would like to be transported immediately, and in perpetuity, to the picnic that Craig Claiborne held on Gardiners Island, just off East Hampton, Long Island, on August 1, 1965. I will live there in a state of perfect bliss, feasting on the following Francophilic offerings:

Bookforum

What is it about the promise of a frozen treat on a hot day that can make a five-year-old wake up in the pitch black of 5:00 am and pad to his mother’s bedside to poke her unceremoniously and ask: “Is it time to make the popsicles?” (No. No, it is not. Not before daylight, and certainly never before coffee.) It is, I suspect, more than just a craving for sugar and cooler temperatures.

Bookforum

"One of the secrets of life during wartime," writes Annia Ciezadlo in Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War, her chronicle of eating in Baghdad in the months after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and in Beirut during the 2006 war with Israel, "is that your senses become unnaturally sharp, more attuned to pleasure in all its forms.

Bookforum

'Tis the season, and I suspect there is no one on earth capable of embracing it more festively than David Wondrich. His first book about cocktails, Imbibe! (2007), is a rousing call to the bar in the form of the life and times of pioneering nineteenth-century bartender—and author of The Bartender's Guide—Jerry Thomas, recipes included.

Bookforum

In the 1980s, we had urban cowboys. Now, we have urban farmers. Where John Travolta in a cowboy hat and big belt buckle was once the emblem of a newly citified country boy, today trends lean in the other direction, with urbanites going back—partway, at least—to the land. Dressed in everything from Carhartt overalls to newly stylish Walmart Wellingtons, they're a generation that finds itself longing for a connection through blackberries of the earthy kind.

Bookforum

Gourmet, as anyone with even the vaguest interest in food knows, is gone. That this is cause for sober reflection practically goes without saying. It was a cornerstone of the food-writing world, one that nurtured adventurous cooks long before most people in America knew what an artichoke was. Fortunately, the magazine met its demise at a time when there are more alternatives than its first readers in 1941 could ever have imagined.

Bookforum

We live in an era of food separatism. Among our factions are the locavores, the vegans, the raw foodists, and the sustainable agriculturists. We have grass-fed beef, grass-finished beef, organic produce, minimally treated produce, and people who swear by or disparage some or all of the four. We have theory after theory—scientific, political, personal—about what to eat and why. We have Top Chef and Iron Chef, and never the twain shall meet.

Bookforum

Alcohol can cause delusions—among Americans, anyway, who think it's reasonable to let a person vote and go to war before giving them the right to sip a fuzzy navel. And these are just the latest symptoms of this affliction, which dates back to colonial days.

Bookforum

Once upon a time, in a land I'd like to visit for dessert—before Skinny Cow and Tasti D-Lite and before America came along and voted plain old vanilla its favorite flavor year after year after year—ice cream was serious stuff. It was so serious, in fact, that people believed it could be deadly. Though sharbat, a fruity drink served over snow or ice, existed in the Middle East in medieval times, the Western world was slow to catch on.

Bookforum

Confession: When I got a galley of Jennifer 8. Lee’s new book about the history of Chinese food in America, I imme­diately flipped to the back, hoping to find my name in the index. And by “my name,” I mean, of course, the name of “my” Chinese restaurant in upper Manhattan, the one where my parents often took my sister and me on Sunday nights for dinner when we were young.

The New York Times Magazine

In the winter of 1991, the novelist Jonathan Franzen was poking around the library at Yaddo, the writers' colony in upstate New York, looking for something new to read. He pulled a slim volume titled ''Desperate Characters'' from the shelf and sat down to look it over. The author's name was Paula Fox.

The New York Times Magazine

Anne Carson is a poet who likes to get under people's skin. Her new collection, ''Men in the Off Hours,'' features verse in which she variously inhabits the minds (and bodies) of Tolstoy, Lazarus, Freud, Catullus, Sappho and Emily Dickinson. Perhaps her boldest act of channeling, though, comes in a prose poem, ''Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve,'' which casts the French movie siren in the role of a witty classics professor.

The New York Times Magazine

People are going to Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of ''Metamorphoses'' in droves, and now your play has just opened. Why do you think we're drawn to classics right now?

The New York Times Magazine

I started at the age of 3, so that's 15 years now. I was probably O.K. until I was 14, and then my friends started not to be in the sport anymore. I really wasn't into anything else. My whole life was gymnastics. There was good and bad at times, but I've definitely gotten more out of life than I ever would have not doing a sport.

The New York Times Magazine

You stunned a lot of people by going back to work two weeks after your second daughter was born -- and going back onstage three weeks after that. Was that a difficult decision for you? Or was it inevitable?

The New York Times Magazine

People say the era of great public spaces has passed. But your plans for a new Penn Station couldn't be much more ambitious, or much grander in scale. So who's right?

The New York Times Magazine

Your new film, ''Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl,'' focuses on the plight of children during the Chinese Cultural Revolution in China. What was life like for you during those years?

The New York Times Magazine

You're one of America's most prominent poets, but you're also famous for being purposefully ''difficult'' -- the sort of writer who's not so much misunderstood as simply not understood at all. How have you resisted the pressure to give in to your critics?

The New York Times Magazine

There are all sorts of books about the technique of dying, but there is no technique of dying. It happens in a trillionth of a second. You can spend your whole life learning, but when the time comes, you're completely unprepared. Everything turns into a cliche, and everyone feels the same thing. And yet it's unique for everybody.

The New York Times Magazine

I think the principal difference is realizing that your house is someplace that you can exclude people from. Almost everybody who is homeless for any period of time has some kind of usual haunts that they tend to orbit around. They know the places, they know where to sleep. But you have no right to be where you are and so you can't keep somebody else out. Before you deal with these things you just don't think that's what the idea of having a place is, to try to keep other people out.

The Nation

“May I tell you how much I love your poems?” Frank O’Hara crowed in the first stanza of a tribute to his friend Kenneth Koch in 1953. “It’s as if a great pipeline had been illicitly tapped/along which all personal characteristics/are making a hasty departure. Tuba? Gin?/…O Kenneth Koch!”

The Nation

In the fall of 1958, the second book by a young British poet named Philip Larkin made it across the ocean and into the consciousness of American poetry. The Less Deceived, wrote a reviewer for the New York Times, made him feel “as if my glasses had been miraculously wiped clean.”

Barnes and Noble Review

No one does fragments — glimpses of ontological questions, of minutiae, of pop culture, ancient civilization, of passion, sorrow, life and death — quite like Anne Carson. The most obvious examples are her translations of the poet Sappho’s fragments in the luminous If Not, Winter (2002), but these are really only the continuation of a long fascination with all that remains unknown. As far back as her earliest poetry and essay collections, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), Glass, Irony and God (1992), and Plainwater (1995), Carson has always, alongside more traditional prose and verse, trafficked in what remains necessarily partial and unfinished in life. 

The New York Times Book Review

Poets, by nature, are incapable of living the unexamined life. No detail is too small, no sound in the night too muffled, to register. From this gradual accumulation of minutiae, this keen awareness, poems emerge. That such gathering should be evident in W. S. Merwin's latest contribution to his enormous body of work is no surprise -- he's had a great deal of practice, not to mention success, over the past five decades.

The Nation

“At times dear Gorham, I feel an enormous power in me–that seems almost supernatural,” Hart Crane wrote to his friend Gorham Munson in 1922. America was under the spell of Modernism, and Crane was on the cusp of his twenty-third birthday, but he had been sure since the age of 17 that he was destined for literary greatness. 

The New York Times Book Review

Way back in 1932, when the century was young and had yet to give way to our collective millennial anxiety, F. Scott Fitzgerald cast a backward glance and wrote that ''New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.'' And though he, like many others, experienced the inevitable disillusionment, that has not prevented a steady flow of people since from wallowing in the gleaming possibility that is Manhattan, among them Frederick Seidel.

The New York Times Book Review

By way of explaining one of her recent poems, ''That the Science of Cartography Is Limited,'' Eavan Boland wrote last year that she remained connected to this poem -- a philosophical measure of how little official documents tell us about humanity -- because it represented to her ''a small diagram of an argument most poets enter at some stage or another: who makes the destination, who marks the way, where is authority and who will contest it?''

The New York Times Book Review

In his first book of poems, published in 1982, Wyatt Prunty asked, ''Is it the ritual or narrative / Of our lives we understand?'' Was that question addressed to himself, or was he perhaps looking for a little help? Whatever the case, Prunty has spent the last two decades trying to find an answer by examining the ways in which human experience is made up of small traditions bound together into a larger story -- the subset of ritual within narrative, one might say.

Some years ago, a friend of mine received a letter informing her that she was being included in an anthology of America's best young writers. Shortly thereafter, she received a second letter telling her that, based on her age (which had initially been miscalculated -- she was in her early 40s), she was no longer one of America's best young writers. The committee was sure she was still a good writer, just not a young one.

To read a poem by John Ashbery is to encounter a mysterious, occasionally frustrating collection of events and emotions that, while they don't necessarily make any kind of linear sense, can be extraordinarily compelling. Even if a line seems illogical -- and there are many such lines in Ashbery's work -- it's integral to the poem in the same way that the random thoughts each of us has on a given day make up the fabric of our existence: Did I remember to lock the door? That woman on the subway looked like my best friend from second grade. I wonder what she's doing. What's it really like to be a policeman?

There is a gravity to Mark Levine's second book, "Enola Gay," the first of three volumes in a promising new poetry series from the University of California Press. The poems in it bear a sense of having struggled up from beneath great pressure to reach the page. It's not that the writing seems labored; rather, the words feel as if they've come to be bound together gradually. In one poem, Levine refers to "a fleet of morbid dreams seeking inland passage," which is a perfect description of the images and difficulties that fill the book. They are at once lugubrious and desolate, and they travel in numbers.

Ah, love. Who among us hasn't hung onto a few of the spoils of romance gone by -- letters tied with fraying, faded ribbon, sappy records, baubles abandoned to the darkest reaches of the jewelry box? And who among us doesn't pull these items out once in a while, perhaps on a rainy Sunday afternoon, to ponder the people we were when we received them and the inevitable disillusionment that led, later, to new loves that suited us better, or perhaps worse?
I, too, am a hoarder of such mementos, and my collection includes a small, tattered paperback that I got in fifth grade, when I really fell in love for the first time -- with poetry.

In his new collection, “Trappings,” Richard Howard makes an old question shine again.

David Lehman made himself write a poem every day, and “The Daily Mirror” is the jazzy, joyful result.

“In a field," Mark Strand famously claimed, "I am the absence of field." Put Carl Phillips in a field, on the other hand, and absence is the last thing on his mind. In "Pastoral," fields and the animals that run through them represent Phillips' fertile vision of the intersection of desire, loss and morality.

Boston Globe

When Nancy Drew stole on to the scene of the crime 75 years ago last April, complete with her shiny blue roadster and her finely tuned sense of good and evil, the teen detective was the very model of the independent-minded young lady on a mission. She was invented in the waning days of the Roaring Twenties by a children's...

The New York Times

Seventy-five years ago this week, the teenage supersleuth Nancy Drew zoomed into the world -- and the hearts and minds of little girls -- in her blue roadster, wearing a perfect frock and brandishing a formidable intelligence tempered by the gentility of her upper-class milieu. Ever since, and even under circumstances that might have knocked down a lesser detective -- war, the Depression, terrorism -- she has prospered. Just last spring, her current publisher, Simon & Schuster, relaunched the series (which has never gone out of print), and the 10 up-to-the-minute titles released so far have sold briskly.

The Los Angeles Times

"My name is Nancy Drew. My friends tell me I'm always looking for trouble, but that's not really true. It just seems to have a way of finding me."Meet America's favorite girl sleuth, circa 2004. She's back in town, in Simon & Schuster's newly launched "Nancy Drew Girl Detective" series, and this time she's talking directly to us, in the first person. Of course, Nancy has spoken to American women and girls from the moment she solved her first crime, in 1930's "The Secret of the Old Clock." 

The New York Times

She wears flimsy lingerie! She's secretly in love with one of the Hardy boys! She's (gasp) middle-aged! Reader, this is not your mother's -- or even your -- Nancy Drew.Then again, maybe she is. Chelsea Cain's gleeful parody "Confessions of a Teen Sleuth" affectionately hits all the formulaic high points of a Nancy Drew mystery, sending up and yet saluting America's favorite girl detective. 

The New York Times Magazine

The modern maraschino cherry is “a real cherry with the cherry flavor removed,” explains Darcy O’Neil, a chemist and the author of “Fix the Pumps,” a history of the soda fountain. The original version, by contrast, was a marasca cherry — a sour, dark variety cultivated on the coast of Dalmatia (now part of Croatia) beginning in the mid-19th century. It was brined in ocean water, then preserved in a liqueur made from its own juices, as well as leaves and ground-up pits.

The New York Times Magazine

In 1848, George Foster, a reporter for The New York Tribune who spent his nights searching for good stories in the city’s seedier quarters, marveled at the way a bartender made a drink: “With his shirt sleeves rolled up, and his face in a fiery glow [he] seems to be pulling long ribbons of julep out of a tin cup.”

The New York Times Magazine

In the beginning, there were Levi’s. In 1853, during the heart of the gold rush, a Bavarian émigré named Levi Strauss arrived in San Francisco from New York, looking to expand his family’s East Coast dry-goods business. Among his wares were blankets, cloth by the yard and durable work pants, sometimes called “jeans pants.”

The New York Times Magazine

“It seems hard to believe it now, but people did not know how to open the bag,” Steven Ausnit, developer of the original Ziploc, recently told an audience at Marquette University. He recalled that sometime around the early 1960s, his company persuaded Columbia Records to try a plastic sleeve with the zipper on top for albums. “At the final meeting, we were all set to go. The guy called in his assistant, handed her the sealed bag and said, ‘Open it.’

The New York Times Magazine

Physicians have long made use of the medicinal powers of cooling. Hippocrates wrote that cold water is to be applied “when there is a hemorrhage, or when it is expected.” During the French Army’s ghastly retreat from Moscow in 1812, Napoleon’s surgeon in chief, Dominique Jean Larrey, used ice and snow to numb soldiers before field amputations.

The New York Times Magazine

Long before Apple and Amazon were founded in humble garages, another quintessentially if decidedly lower-tech American success story began the same way — only the garage was used as a human launching pad. In the summer of 1960, Robert D. Carrier, who worked as an upholsterer at a boat-seating manufacturer, arrived home to find his 10-year-old son, Mike, and a friend on the family’s driveway in Lakewood, Calif.

Slate Book Review

I had an odd experience while reading The Entertainer, Margaret Talbot’s wry, wonderful new book about her irrepressible actor father, Lyle, and American entertainment over the course of the 20th century. Every time I opened it, an accompanying soundtrack began to play in my head.

Barnes and Noble Review

“Lillian’s Hellman’s body may have been in her grave,” writes biographer Alice Kessler-Harris of her subject’s funeral in 1984, long after Hellman’s rise to fame — and then infamy — as, among other things, a playwright, a would-be patriot who refused to name names during the fever of McCarthyism, a defender of the USSR, a bestselling memoirist, a mink coat model, and Dashiell Hammett’s longtime lover. “But quickly it became apparent that she would find no rest there.”

Slate Book Review

When did you know you weren’t going to like Eat, Pray, Love? For me, it was the moment when Elizabeth Gilbert—weeping on the bathroom floor of the perfect house she shared with the lovely man she no longer wanted to be married to for reasons she couldn’t really explain—looked in desperation to God, asking for help. What he told her, gently, in his beneficent Godlike way, was to go back to bed. And just like that, she knew everything would work out.

Barnes and Noble Review

It's spring, and as such, love is in the air—perhaps nowhere more so than in A Jane Austen Education, William Deresiewicz’s encomium to the humor, wisdom, and perennial appeal of his main literary squeeze. Also the author of an academic tome called Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets, he’s now taken a less formal look at Austen as a kind of guru on the subject of—to borrow the title of another recent book in the same vein—how to live, and he casts his story first and foremost as anaffair for the ages. To wit, his opening gambit: “I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six year old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life.”

Bookforum

When asked why she had decided to give red hair to her famous heroine, Anne Shirley (better known as Anne of Green Gables to legions of little girls the world over), author Maud Montgomery replied, “I didn’t. It was red.”

Bookforum

Most startling in the wealth of John Stubbs's new life of John Donne is that the subject of the biographer's attentions spent a very long time trying to escape his poetic fate. Even late in his life, according to Stubbs, Donne was fending off his literary inclinations like so many pesky acquaintances. He complained about having "this itch of writing" and told a friend that he wanted to follow "a graver course than of a Poet, into which (that I may also keep my dignity) I would not seem to relapse."

In the 120 years that have elapsed since the first publication of Emily Dickinson's poems, no description of their effect has yet bested the exclamation of an early reader who found them to be "a shaft of light sunk instantaneously into the dark abysm." Sly and diamond-brilliant in their capacity for revealing the human condition in the fewest words, the nearly 2,000 poems Dickinson wrote in her upstairs bedroom in Amherst, Mass., remain shocking in their incisiveness even now. Her life, in marked contrast, has always been shrouded in silence, misinformation and speculation. As one mourner recorded in her journal upon Dickinson's death in 1886, "Rare Emily Dickinson died -- went back into a little deeper mystery than that she has always lived in."

hat a brave man she was," Ivan Turgenev once said about George Sand, "and what a good woman." It's a perfect characterization of a person who, while she was certainly both brave and good, also spent her life preoccupied with the ways in which men and women -- and society's notions about what each should be -- both complement and harm each other. Famed for cross-dressing, the scandalous novels that made her name and innumerable love affairs, most notably with Frederic Chopin, Sand wrote what she lived and lived what she wrote.

Bobbie Ann Mason left Kentucky for New York City, but the writer in her stayed home on the farm.

Bookforum

Hearing the name Eva Thorvald, you might expect to find the central character of J. Ryan Stradal’s first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest (Pamela Dorman Books, $28), smack in the middle of a multigenerational family saga as styled by Ingmar Bergman in full Fanny and Alexander mode: Scandinavian abundance with a dark existential underbelly, the kaleidoscopic shifting apart and coming back together of lovers, spouses,

…

The Nation

"There were two worlds." So begins Dylan Ebdus, the boy hero who grows up in the pages of The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem's rich, dizzying new novel of Brooklyn, adolescence, comic books, crime, doo-wop, punk, fathers, sons and a thousand other phenomena, including supernatural powers.

The New York Times

In 1975, the children's author Natalie Babbitt published a slim, ruminative novel called ''Tuck Everlasting.'' From the moment it appeared, it has been fiercely loved by children and their parents for its honest, intelligent grappling with aging and death. It seems appropriate, then, that the novel's new film adaptation had its genesis (more than 10 years ago) not at a power meeting in a Hollywood studio but during a family discussion.

Salon

Through these classics of childhood, a kid could suffer the privations of starvation in the flashlight-lit privacy of her own imagination — and live to cherish the memory.