https://www.melanierehak.com/bookforum-article daily 0.75 2024-01-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1518125096355-L4Z41VIN9TUPNQ99FNZ7/71CK6QyOeyL.jpeg On Food - Practical Magic 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... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1518125096355-L4Z41VIN9TUPNQ99FNZ7/71CK6QyOeyL.jpeg On Food - Practical Magic 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... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1519590880111-0CSUFZJM8BBBV0KGDB9O/cover00_teaser.jpg On Food - DOS AND DONUTS 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... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517848946154-1BKK01EEMDUIS0PM5VVB/rawImage.jpg On Food - Alice’s Restaurant: A new memoir recounts the making of Chez Panisse. 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1519591680494-ZJQMPR531969KOTONJJ6/cover00_teaser-1.jpg On Food - COOKING WITH SASS 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). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1519591807885-4BPV0GEGU7JZGSGKJTYH/article00.jpg On Food - SURREAL MEALS 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, https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1519591923649-YTMT8K3KL1PZQFLMWEZV/article00-1.jpg On Food - FIGHT GRUB 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1519592032030-0PG171OHSL0EM5JZVXRZ/article00-2.jpg On Food - OUR K-TOWN 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... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517850045229-FKCK4LXEPQORXJF1HZ7Q/b0be438417e43116f5aaa86e5c2f0272--dan-barber-summer-reading-lists.jpg On Food - What the Earth Has to Offer 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517849907698-ABREAAXWQIWJM95B3GY8/91ZLkBYle8L.jpg On Food - A Provençal Feast 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.) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517849777328-35J9MVRGPPE2ZNTLIOXG/article00-1.jpg On Food - What Was the Hip Butcher? 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... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517849673434-9LXD7TVBT0LUTDLRI1UP/a-big-storm-knocked-it-over.jpg On Food - Repast Imperfect 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1572979683512-FZNQRSRZUDRDJM5P8LLA/Screen+Shot+2019-11-05+at+1.47.45+PM.png On Food - Child of the '60s 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517849574695-O2V5B0MA7IA0JWKRTZC8/u34%2B1F%21EVWH7ngw7NLVXIcKIKW2pmYA%2BGl%21w8rbMsYH%21BRIAG5OUet9tcq9F2XjffXkZsjELHH1dotzfe59AzwWFQeC0ayT3jWkW1aoOtv5Q5iDKyCBWtzAWMsmQ%2B7PK.png On Food - Eat, Memory 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517849436779-WHDFVZ7780LVT4ISU2FA/harvest-field-notes-from-a-far-flung-pursuit-of-real-food.jpg On Food - Playing Chicken 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?” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517849304734-N5QDIONOZTS04RZ5VJB8/repast-dining-out-at-the-dawn-of-the-new-american-century-1900-1910.jpg On Food - Automat for the People 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517850306289-MX2EV1ZZ1E9G1DXZ3JYI/Screen+Shot+2018-02-05+at+11.45.41+AM.png On Food - Candy Darling 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517849199301-9X16RR4SID3TG3L5CJ3C/81Uc0ddmLNL.jpg On Food - Braising Hell Bookforum “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.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1518363856103-CZLPZDAAFPXRMTDGA43J/Screen+Shot+2018-02-11+at+10.44.02+AM.png On Food - Season's Eatings 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517679036691-QVHE1PXDJV08U1G3WWR2/food-truck-1-flick_library-groover.jpg On Food - TRUCKING OUT 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517678979757-FA25ZDVJCYF7N5MO0R2Y/Screen+Shot+2018-02-03+at+12.29.19+PM.png On Food - LUSH LIFE: THE MAD MEN COOKBOOK 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1519592125182-MIYA5UMMTHAOV3ZBPY4W/article00-4.jpg On Food - DIXIE CHIC 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: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517678838074-P7FIYKERDL7NZ9RGDTI8/Striped+Juice+Bar+Pop.jpg On Food - Sweet Reveries 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517678663725-NWUJLU1D7NTFE5IWV7CY/martin.jpg On Food https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517678880510-2GIHTB5CUOXHQCKOUK8S/cf293c99-c87d-47a4-847c-ff3919016e0e_1461449450119_HighRes.png On Food - Day of Honey 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517678914844-QSJ7POVBKRPOILOX7H59/punch.jpg On Food - The Golden Bowl 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517680315240-9J9E4PMK46AOZ8EPR7K5/img356.jpg On Food - GROWING PAINS 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517680519141-KL0A4X7D2E73SHV30FWA/Goldstein-e1282664538969.jpg On Food - Food Issues: As eating habits change, so do the magazines that nourish our appetites. 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517680684345-LM04574Y8BWDTNSDJAEW/81MfouK2okL.jpg On Food - Guiltless Gourmet: Brillat-Savarin's classic work exhorts us to eat, drink, and most of all be merry. 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517680841331-LVH635XQHLNVS9UFFALJ/6a00e553b3da2088340120a64c0851970b.jpg On Food - Red Wine and Blue: Americans have a long and contradictory history of imbibing and proscribing. 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517680912657-BW0V9TYAA2UGSA5V2RPK/71g9WqCD%2B6L.jpg On Food - Sweet Truth: Appreciations of ice cream and cake celebrate the deliciously fattening over the guiltily consumed fake. 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517687401555-UYP637Y4KR87V1LNIDD8/F16-1-fortune+cookie+chronicles+book.jpg On Food - Sweet and Sour 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517687344521-8VEPCH867B8B8PYJWXPJ/61ecDL-GqoL.jpg On Food - Now That's Itialian! Bookforum Tucked in among the many gems—culinary, historical, literary, religious, and otherwise—stashed throughout Gillian Riley’s new Oxford Companion to Italian Food is “The Pope’s Kitchen,” a luscious, whimsical sonnet by the nineteenth-century Roman poet Gioachino Giuseppe Belli, which I cannot bear to include here in anything but its entirety https://www.melanierehak.com/nancy-drew-articles daily 0.75 2018-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517683535875-CJ1FZAD5042WO6QVO30V/1126364017_4855.jpg Nancy Drew Articles - Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Mean Girls 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... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517683535875-CJ1FZAD5042WO6QVO30V/1126364017_4855.jpg Nancy Drew Articles - Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Mean Girls 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... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517683717010-6XZ4I79W1DKI9Z9CUFMP/24drew.span.jpg Nancy Drew Articles - Our Teenage Heroine at 75 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517683703115-DGQ8FMY2XD0NZAYQZYNR/cvr9780689865688_9780689865688_hr.jpg Nancy Drew Articles - A Bit of the Old, a Bit of the New, She's Still Our Nancy Drew 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." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517683803788-DF6NMLS1FCVXK1AXK91J/Screen+Shot+2018-02-03+at+1.49.41+PM.png Nancy Drew Articles - 'Confessions of a Teen Sleuth': Secret of the Old Crock 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. https://www.melanierehak.com/all-other-articles daily 0.75 2019-11-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517849021184-2TNVLP73YC2BTRM89XSJ/1211_SBR_TheEntertainer_Illo.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg On Non-Fiction - The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father's 20th Century / Margaret Talbot 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517849021184-2TNVLP73YC2BTRM89XSJ/1211_SBR_TheEntertainer_Illo.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg On Non-Fiction - The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father's 20th Century / Margaret Talbot 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517689183747-GAX3PB0RN3LEQXJUA987/ADifficultWoman_AF.jpg On Non-Fiction - A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman / Alice Kessler-Harris 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.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517689840920-XWGYW2FORGPS8W8H9DPE/120229_BOOKS_wildHorseTrail.jpg.CROP.rectangle3-large.jpg On Non-Fiction - Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail / Cheryl Strayed 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517689171556-MWZ1L14QDTN6NG5LX75P/JaneAustinEducation_AF.jpg On Non-Fiction - A Jane Austen Education / William Deresiewicz 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.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517690889656-AUE0ZHR7AGUEOZEAWY9H/LookingforAnne.jpg On Non-Fiction - Looking For Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L.M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic / Irene Gammel 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.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517690778878-JFZ0NQTIZHEPRANC6NP8/john-donne-the-reformed-soul-a-biography.jpg On Non-Fiction - John Donne: The Reformed Soul / John Stubbs 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." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1524332875590-P8TD5J8VKHE3PNM5ZN9C/Screen+Shot+2018-04-21+at+1.47.52+PM.png On Non-Fiction - Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds / Lyndall Gordon 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." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1524334080210-T3AFHFJJKYKT5PN848NW/Screen+Shot+2018-04-21+at+2.07.54+PM.png On Non-Fiction - GEORGE SAND: A WOMAN'S LIFE WRIT LARGE / Belinda Jack 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1524334345527-K22GVHM21CNXSB3N3TU1/Screen+Shot+2018-04-21+at+2.12.20+PM.png On Non-Fiction - CLEAR SPRINGS: A MEMOIR / Bobbie Ann Mason Bobbie Ann Mason left Kentucky for New York City, but the writer in her stayed home on the farm. https://www.melanierehak.com/new-york-times-interviews daily 0.75 2018-04-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517845641595-Z9JXKHBPTJB6G7V0VIWA/mag-21WMT-t_CA0-videoSixteenByNine1050.jpg Who Made That? - Who Made That Maraschino Cherry? 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517845641595-Z9JXKHBPTJB6G7V0VIWA/mag-21WMT-t_CA0-videoSixteenByNine1050.jpg Who Made That? - Who Made That Maraschino Cherry? 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517845641980-M0MHV45GEHPZSQ7YJSR5/07wmt-master1050-v2.jpg Who Made That? - Who Made That Cocktail Shaker? 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.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517845521437-V5HUGZHRZDE2DSSUNOKB/24wmt-master1050-v3.jpg Who Made That? - Who Made Those Bluejeans? 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.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517845642465-6XVI6ROYZVBBORD2447A/27wmt-master1050-v2.jpg Who Made That? - Who Made That Ziploc Bag? 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.’ https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517845641982-AZQZ9IBE11ZI3EHKZ2GP/mag-13WMT-t_CA0-master1050.jpg Who Made That? - Who Made That Ice Pack? 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517845293745-YS2LLBVF9OQOSKPTKR7O/Screen-Shot-2018-02-05-at-10.34.18-AM.jpg Who Made That? - Who Made That Slip ’N Slide? 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. https://www.melanierehak.com/news daily 0.75 2018-02-11 https://www.melanierehak.com/landscape-architecture-magazine daily 0.75 2018-05-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517842850115-FVF98NQUTO3P3ZUN7VF4/Screen+Shot+2018-02-05+at+10.00.25+AM.png Landscape Architecture Magazine - The Bounty of the Boroughs he Leave It Better Kids’ Community Garden, in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx, occupies a corner lot just a few blocks from an elevated part of the subway line that runs along Jerome Avenue. A pawn shop and a run-down deli are on either side, and the Gospel Tabernacle Church is around the corner. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517842850115-FVF98NQUTO3P3ZUN7VF4/Screen+Shot+2018-02-05+at+10.00.25+AM.png Landscape Architecture Magazine - The Bounty of the Boroughs he Leave It Better Kids’ Community Garden, in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx, occupies a corner lot just a few blocks from an elevated part of the subway line that runs along Jerome Avenue. A pawn shop and a run-down deli are on either side, and the Gospel Tabernacle Church is around the corner. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517842852143-QPP3K1VIKMZNGG27V0CS/Screen+Shot+2018-02-05+at+10.00.05+AM.png Landscape Architecture Magazine - Heaven's Skate Skating in Central Park with my father, while endearingly tinny versions of “Downtown” and “New York, New York” played over the 1970s loudspeakers, was one of the great pleasures of my urban childhood. In sun and in snow, in heavy coats we eventually shed once we really got moving, we spent hours going around and around the Wollman Rink, looking up at and out into the majesty of the landscape around us, anticipating the hot chocolate to come. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517842657688-A4W6OJKVKGVN9D9W0JIL/Screen+Shot+2018-02-03+at+1.56.38+PM.png Landscape Architecture Magazine - One Guy, One Path: Jon Piasecki’s Stone River It’s very hard, in this world of stimuli, to make something in nature that’s strong enough to pull you into it.” This is what Jon Piasecki, ASLA, says to me as I come, thanks to him, as close as I ever will to walking on water. We’re standing near the middle of his ethereal Stone River, a winding 900-foot path of mica schist slabs that runs through the center of what was once a wide stone wall on the wooded grounds of a private estate in Dutchess County in eastern New York. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517842662266-7MUVG3KZ4EKCO4ZJBYSS/Screen+Shot+2018-02-03+at+2.02.04+PM.png Landscape Architecture Magazine - What Kate Orff Sees Kate Orff is a self-proclaimed bird freak. She is also, at the age of 40, the founder of Scape, a small landscape architecture firm in manhattan, an assistant professor of urban design and architecture at Columbia University, a wife and the mother of two young children, and a rabid consumer of hot sauce. but it’s the bird thing that keeps coming up. https://www.melanierehak.com/girl-sleuth-press daily 0.75 2018-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517853252830-KCKJNFNE4ZC03ZJXCNN0/default-thumbnail.png Girl Sleuth Press - The Atlantic Yes, I was one of the slightly vintage women who let out a shriek when we saw it at Costco: The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, a complete boxed set, fifty-six familiar yellow spines, shrink-wrapped. I can't remember now if it was $100 or $200 or $500, but I immediately paid it, with shaking hands. Surely my six-year-old niece or my preschool-aged daughters would eventually enjoy—indeed, would require—this treasure trove https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517853252830-KCKJNFNE4ZC03ZJXCNN0/default-thumbnail.png Girl Sleuth Press - The Atlantic Yes, I was one of the slightly vintage women who let out a shriek when we saw it at Costco: The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, a complete boxed set, fifty-six familiar yellow spines, shrink-wrapped. I can't remember now if it was $100 or $200 or $500, but I immediately paid it, with shaking hands. Surely my six-year-old niece or my preschool-aged daughters would eventually enjoy—indeed, would require—this treasure trove https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517853248273-Z09Z89SORZS9WML3OEEW/New_York_Times_logo_variation.jpg Girl Sleuth Press - The New York Times Melanie Rehak's amiable and thorough new book begins and ends with appeals to the reader. Her first sentence is direct: "Grab your magnifying glass, because this is a mystery story." Her last line is more of an entreaty. "There are fighting days still ahead of us," she writes, "and we're going to need her." The "her" is Nancy Drew, the fictional teenage detective whose authorship and enduring popularity are the subjects of "Girl Sleuth." The "us" in the sentence is women. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517853238484-D8512BXU5F4AG39D7DNG/The-Nation-112716A.png Girl Sleuth Press - The Nation  Since 1930 Nancy Drew has installed herself in the wayward hearts of young girls, heedless of the Depression, four wars (not counting the present one), civil rights, feminism, Gerald Ford and drugs, sex and rock and roll. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517853783870-Y7VTVCEFAKN4FOBESNYW/csm_logo_1500x1500.png Girl Sleuth Press - Christian Science Monitor 'Is it possible that there breathes somewhere a female between the ages of nine and 49 who doesn't know Nancy Drew?" asked one of the girl detective's adult fans.Probably not. The titian-haired sleuth has left her mark on American womanhood for generations now. Bette Davis, Barbara Walters, Mary Tyler Moore, Joan Mondale, Fran Lebowitz, Beverly Sills, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are just a few of her avowed fans. https://www.melanierehak.com/girl-sleuth-interviews daily 0.75 2018-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517854323247-WITU1FDYWJRNY61C8HB1/harcourt-school-publishers-logo-primary.jpg Girl Sleuth Interviews - Harcourt Press Girl Sleuth’s 384 pages are filled with more than 500 quotes, and biographical and historical information on Edward Stratemeyer, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Mildred Wirt Benson, the women’s suffrage movement, the publishing industry, and much more. From beginning to end, how long did it take you to write this book? And where did you begin? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517854323247-WITU1FDYWJRNY61C8HB1/harcourt-school-publishers-logo-primary.jpg Girl Sleuth Interviews - Harcourt Press Girl Sleuth’s 384 pages are filled with more than 500 quotes, and biographical and historical information on Edward Stratemeyer, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Mildred Wirt Benson, the women’s suffrage movement, the publishing industry, and much more. From beginning to end, how long did it take you to write this book? And where did you begin? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517854330077-JYTGXK3T65PDUMQH51D2/image5130288x.jpg Girl Sleuth Interviews - The Washington Post She came along in 1930 when girls needed a new kind of heroine, a perfectly groomed teenage sleuth at the wheel of a blue roadster -- unflappable and brave in the face of a modern world full of dangers and mysteries. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517854338199-AF7I9IJZQRNFCHDMI9H6/news_2009_11_06_logo.jpg Girl Sleuth Interviews - New York Public Library A look at Nancy Drew and the whole idea of female investigators with Cullman Center Fellow Melanie Rehak, author of Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, and Laura Lippman, prize-winning author of the Tess Monaghan mystery series and To The Power of Three. David Ferriero, the Andrew W. Mellon Director and Chief Executive of the Research Libraries, NYPL, will moderate. Co-presented with The Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517854342629-83OQMXAAC51LQTQKWY1S/NPR2.jpg Girl Sleuth Interviews - NPR Of course, Nancy Drew first snooped her way to the scene of the crime in print, "The Secret of the Old Clock" launched the mystery series in 1930. And if you read the books, you'll remember Nancy's loving widowed father, her girl chums George and Bess, and the long-suffering boyfriend, Ned Nickerson. The books are still written today, albeit with some changes - Nancy drives a hybrid and uses email. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517854351450-I5WTQM2YB72TBXXTECWU/static1.squarespace.png Girl Sleuth Interviews - WNYC Nancy Drew turned 75 this year and Melanie Rehak has written a biography of sorts of the fictional detective and how she came to be called Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517854381148-MCQ91DP2YLG6MWCLCE4B/Wisconsin_Public_Radio_Logo.png Girl Sleuth Interviews - Wisconsin Public Radio It was April of 1930 and America was about to fall in love. Nancy Drew inspired passionate devotion in the hearts of American’s little girls. The amazing thing is 75 years later she is still going strong. https://www.melanierehak.com/eating-press daily 0.75 2018-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517862264717-98QPU7BE0AKZRI450RHR/BDC_b_logo_transparent_background_og.jpg Eating Press - Boston Writer Melanie Rehak is the mother of then 1-year-old Jules, a picky eater. She also has a head full of facts about organic food, hormone-free milk, free-range chicken, and food miles. What should she be feeding — or at least attempting to feed — her child? “If I chose chicken that was hormone-free but not free-range, was there any point?’’ she asks. “Was it really so bad to eat a hot dog once in a while?’’ https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517862264717-98QPU7BE0AKZRI450RHR/BDC_b_logo_transparent_background_og.jpg Eating Press - Boston Writer Melanie Rehak is the mother of then 1-year-old Jules, a picky eater. She also has a head full of facts about organic food, hormone-free milk, free-range chicken, and food miles. What should she be feeding — or at least attempting to feed — her child? “If I chose chicken that was hormone-free but not free-range, was there any point?’’ she asks. “Was it really so bad to eat a hot dog once in a while?’’ https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517862271577-77ZJ2FNURF2CKIOTN8XC/cleveland.com-logoColorHigh1.jpg Eating Press - Cleveland If you feel a sensual rush in an open-air farmers market ("Ah, pyramids of mellow fruit") and a smidgen of moral uplift ("I'm buying local"), you will enjoy "Eating for Beginners," a fine blend of the investigative and the intimate. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517862284924-U5NWPCRN1PX4DG7G9U1N/image5130288x.jpg Eating Press - The Washington Post Foodies have it pretty good these days. Farmers markets abound. Reality TV shows serve up every conceivable kitchen-related scenario. A bounty of new culinary books comes out each year, from gloriously illustrated cookbooks to engaging reads on where food really comes from, how it's processed and why you shouldn't be eating so much of it. Here are three that caught our eye. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517862290272-HWL3LXDA945QDFEX80YK/pw_logo.png Eating Press - Publishers Weekly Rehak, who writes Bookforum’s “Paper Palate” food books column and the blog Eating for Beginners, felt confused and guilty about her food choices after reading books by Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and others. So she joined the kitchen staff at a small restaurant that served almost exclusively locally grown food, and worked on some of the farms that supplied the restaurant. She shares what she learned and how she used it to combat her young son’s fussy eating habits. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517862428042-RCH5AJH1V29BW8XPYMXQ/pw_logo.png Eating Press - Publisher's Weekly Rehak recounts her journey as an amateur chef, amateur farmer, and amateur parent. https://www.melanierehak.com/eating-interview daily 0.75 2018-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517862541497-HWDF7SXA4BUDIH7LT07U/static1.squarespace.png Eating Interviews - WNYC A four-part interview series entitled "Food and the City" Melanie Rehak poet, critic, and author of Eating for Beginner: An Education in the Pleasures of food from Chefs, Farmers, and One Picky Kid reports on food from the farm, the fishing boat, the delivery truck, a Brooklyn locavore restaurant, and her own kitchen. Each week in November she shares what she's learned. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517862541497-HWDF7SXA4BUDIH7LT07U/static1.squarespace.png Eating Interviews - WNYC A four-part interview series entitled "Food and the City" Melanie Rehak poet, critic, and author of Eating for Beginner: An Education in the Pleasures of food from Chefs, Farmers, and One Picky Kid reports on food from the farm, the fishing boat, the delivery truck, a Brooklyn locavore restaurant, and her own kitchen. Each week in November she shares what she's learned. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517862601282-4I808HMRBB3KNM9FBLRL/logo.png Eating Interviews - KPBS I'm Maureen Cavanaugh, and you're listening to These Days on KPBS. Every month on this program we have a show about the delights of food. We often focus on the new ideas about food, how to buy and prepare locally grown foods, how to support local organic growers, how to fit the slow food philosophy into a fast paced life. If all the new information about food leaves you a little confused at the supermarket, you are not alone. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517862607430-8126DUEPHKWN0GV4CEHK/news_2009_11_06_logo.jpg Eating Interviews - New York Public Library Poet and Journalist Melanie Rehak, Steve Jenkins (The Food Life), Fairway's part-owner and cheese monger extraordinaire, and David Shea, the founder of applewood restaurant in Brooklyn, discuss, among other things, Rehak's Eating for Beginner: An Education in the Pleasures of food from Chefs, Farmers, and One Picky Kid. Their conversation will be moderated by the journalist and author Patrick Radden Keefe (Chatter, The Snakehead). https://www.melanierehak.com/the-nation daily 0.75 2019-11-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517690402592-O1977W50CBX3HIW1NU75/the-collected-poems-of-kenneth-koch.jpg On Poetry - The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch 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!” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517690402592-O1977W50CBX3HIW1NU75/the-collected-poems-of-kenneth-koch.jpg On Poetry - The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch 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!” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517690227201-E09M9ZN9KJN5RVGWYNXS/81JBJ%2BzlzHL.jpg On Poetry - The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin 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.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517689154956-YXQF7N17F134BRSR697X/nox_AF.jpg On Poetry - Nox / Anne Carson 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517691189269-6I8MGSBAD0LSIDMLCWEZ/Screen+Shot+2018-02-03+at+3.52.55+PM.png On Poetry - The River Sound / W.S Merwin 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517690621223-GMM1TODXKST8HPAV94VI/Screen+Shot+2018-02-03+at+3.43.27+PM.png On Poetry - The Library of America Collected Poems and Letters of Hart Crane 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517691734309-00SPJTNVXKKYZESM6WV6/Screen+Shot+2018-02-03+at+4.01.58+PM.png On Poetry - Going Fast / Frederick Seidel 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517861201490-SOG1SHEGCDR0TLP0XUX5/31r1ZHC5W3L._SX322_BO1%2C204%2C203%2C200_.jpg On Poetry - Against Love Poetry / Eavan Boland 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?'' https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517861201615-62AXHHVOHPMT459SH7CZ/61ikFJuuIvL.jpg On Poetry - Unarmed and Dangerous / Wyatt Prunty 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1524332317662-OJVZ13EI0L45WVFOR19G/Screen+Shot+2018-04-21+at+1.38.07+PM.png On Poetry - Once I Gazed at You in Wonder / Jan Heller Levi and Dailies and Rushes / Susan Kinsolving 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1524332972722-8YTSGBDY8II6H9O491G2/Screen+Shot+2018-04-21+at+1.49.07+PM.png On Poetry - Your Name Here / John Ashbery 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? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1524333174410-92J0KNTWRP7RFJHYUVCT/Screen+Shot+2018-04-21+at+1.52.44+PM.png On Poetry - Enola Gay / Mark Levine 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1524333235595-S85BW4PLZWGZWVPOF2L1/Screen+Shot+2018-04-21+at+1.53.43+PM.png On Poetry - First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1524333391504-DB55OXAZB7K323UQZHVQ/Screen+Shot+2018-04-21+at+1.56.04+PM.png On Poetry - Trappings / Richard Howard In his new collection, “Trappings,” Richard Howard makes an old question shine again. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1524333526898-O3SJE25H7TIRK850HDCA/Screen+Shot+2018-04-21+at+1.58.43+PM.png On Poetry - The Daily Mirror / David Lehman David Lehman made himself write a poem every day, and “The Daily Mirror” is the jazzy, joyful result. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1524333759347-JR7MM807JDA6LH3B57QC/Screen+Shot+2018-04-21+at+2.02.32+PM.png On Poetry - Pastoral / Carl Phillps “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. https://www.melanierehak.com/profiles-and-interviews daily 0.75 2018-04-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1518363444033-HCNVXC1C976IUW39ONCE/04fox-obit-4-facebookJumbo.jpg Profiles and Interviews - The Life and Death and Life of Paula Fox 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1518363444033-HCNVXC1C976IUW39ONCE/04fox-obit-4-facebookJumbo.jpg Profiles and Interviews - The Life and Death and Life of Paula Fox 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1518363383222-0H2IYG2KDZAIZ9LNMC5E/17carson1-jumbo-v3.jpg Profiles and Interviews - Things Fall Together: A Profile on Anne Carson 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517685242243-MXSFM2EHXGHJDMD7XV7B/derek-walcott.jpg Profiles and Interviews - Questions for Derek Walcott; Poet of the Ages 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? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517860941886-BUGL58OJ9XW99FEH2XZN/18TEENSweb2sub-blog427.jpg Profiles and Interviews - Questions for Dominique Moceanu; The Divorced Daughter 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517685076949-9QW35U8XY1TDY3SL9NNM/09FLEMING-facebookJumbo.jpg Profiles and Interviews - Questions for Renée Fleming; Lullabye Diva 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? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517685187882-PX2DJLUQ2XVF0YQPBAOG/childs-53167283-crop-56f605783df78c78418a3915.jpg Profiles and Interviews - Questions for David Childs; Spatial Relations 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? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517860938494-33X9QFY51WJ3LOSM1XIS/joan+chen.jpg Profiles and Interviews - Questions for Joan Chen; The Revolution of Little Girls 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? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517684923606-EITNW7Y8HY835L5BM9GG/15MS-ASHBERY1-master1050.jpg Profiles and Interviews - Questions for John Ashbery; A Child in Time 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? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517685068429-N8OWC2DLDXW5PX2QJ6DL/rorem.jpg Profiles and Interviews - Questions for Ned Rorem; Elegy: Upon Mourning 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517860953988-5XRSCGXO7P3FF2YXSJYB/austin_xtra_feature1-2.gif Profiles and Interviews - Questions for Lars Eighner; A Roof of One's Own 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517860925420-MBTR6Q9AQCF1BSQDAF38/Patricia_Cornwell.jpg Profiles and Interviews - Questions for Patricia Cornwell; What Are Cops Afraid Of? The New York Times Magazine What's the most surprising thing you've learned over the many years you've been writing about cops? I think it's how absolutely fragile they are. They live with a lot of fear, and the way they deal with their sensitivity and the horror of their work is that they laugh at things sometimes I thought they shouldn't laugh at. It's not because they're callous, it's not even because they're sexist when they're sitting there talking about some woman's body and describing whether they like it or not when the poor person's got a bullet in her head. It's because they can't cope. https://www.melanierehak.com/on-fiction daily 0.75 2019-11-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1519591155727-J4NKHCL5MX179G73A2JC/article00-3.jpg On Fiction and Film - KITCHENS OF THE GREAT MIDWEST / J. Ryan Stradal 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, … https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1519591155727-J4NKHCL5MX179G73A2JC/article00-3.jpg On Fiction and Film - KITCHENS OF THE GREAT MIDWEST / J. Ryan Stradal 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, … https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517690038138-QJN8OCF5D833JX1UH005/fortress-of-solitude-1.jpg On Fiction and Film - The Fortress of Solitude / Jonathan Lethem 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517848405922-RNS7V4IZH88NYJ4JVN4R/tuck-everlasting-03-1.jpg On Fiction and Film - Falling for a Children's Tale of an Age-Old Wish 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1524334595147-4U1Z1FGKQL3JITWS8J4N/Screen+Shot+2018-04-21+at+2.16.25+PM.png On Fiction and Film - LITTLE GIRLS ON THE BIG PRAIRIE 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. https://www.melanierehak.com/poetry-1 daily 0.75 2018-05-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517688259749-M4PXY4906Y1JWDCZCAOD/2006_10_16.jpg Poetry - Autobiography: New York The New Yorker https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517688259749-M4PXY4906Y1JWDCZCAOD/2006_10_16.jpg Poetry - Autobiography: New York The New Yorker https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517688589072-CJT7V0EK2Q51Q051NGJ7/2004_04_12.jpg Poetry - The Modernist Impulse The New Yorker https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517688342376-NBZCP470AY99PQSMP2DG/2001_06_18.jpg Poetry - Still-Life, Middle Haddam Road The New Yorker https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1518365517007-XTJ2CJQYBA3HS4A7OPU2/Issue165_3D_rev.png Poetry - Self-Portrait as the Liberal Arts The Paris Review, Issue 165 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1518365378122-OJG4QCRUYO762YYO613V/Issue150_3D_rev.png Poetry - Three Poems The Paris Review, Issue 150 https://www.melanierehak.com/home daily 1.0 2018-02-11 https://www.melanierehak.com/coming-soon daily 0.75 2018-02-15 https://www.melanierehak.com/about1 daily 0.75 2023-04-27 https://www.melanierehak.com/articles daily 0.75 2018-04-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517686949531-JJ8967ZN84X1VG0TRZV5/1200px-Queen_Mary_2_outbound_from_Southampton_2_Sept_2013.jpg Articles https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517687001490-O79SIMB1S62RY6FM4L0D/24821929483_3342283d5d_b.jpg Articles https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517686918171-C0MNIPNDTYSXRYEW9V6A/Regensburg_square.jpg Articles https://www.melanierehak.com/contact daily 0.75 2018-02-05 https://www.melanierehak.com/books daily 0.75 2019-06-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517697962689-M3GA77DSPD0CLU37YALG/girl-sleuth.jpg Books https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517697955242-6FQY78AH70AIH973YHZO/Eating-for-Beginners.jpg Books https://www.melanierehak.com/eating-for-beginners daily 0.75 2018-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517700968309-5RWNA2RJE2ASG33S7NCN/Eating-for-Beginners.jpg Eating for Beginners https://www.melanierehak.com/girl-sleuth daily 0.75 2018-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7475a92278e7991f524836/1517702161105-WDNOOM906F5AZMGDRC10/girl-sleuth.jpg Girl Sleuth https://www.melanierehak.com/poetry daily 0.75 2018-04-22