Christened by John Updike as the "poet of the appetites," M.F.K. Fisher changed the way Americans understood the art of living. But she was also a master mythologizer. This multifaceted portrayal is no less memorable than the personae Fisher crafted for herself.

Fisher pays tribute to one of the most delicate and enigmatic of foods--the oyster--in this gastronomical classic, originally published in 1941 and now reissued as a sumptuous jacketed paperback. Includes 28 recipes and descriptions of various regional styles of preparation.

Poetry

Fisher identifies a variety of human cravings and the means to find nourishment in what is the most intimate of the five volumes in North Point's jacketed paperback series, now complete.

This literary study explores how agribusiness, industrial agriculture and countercultural food movements underpin modern American conceptions of global power.

Winner of the National Book Award in 1991 “This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel’s Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine’s characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living ‘at the borders of dreams.’ One reads The Tempest ‘slowly to himself’; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of ‘the dark from the dark.’ What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet . . . very accessible and utterly American in tone and language.” —Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal

In An Extravagant Hunger, time slows and is relished, and the turning points and casual strolls of M.F.K. Fisher's life are unwrapped and savored. From the Berengaria that washed her across the sea to France in 1929, to Le Paquis, the Swiss estate that later provided a backdrop for some of the most idyllic and fleeting moments of her life, the stories of Fisher's love for food and her love for family and men are meticulously researched and exquisitely captured in this book. Exploring Fisher's lonely and formative time in Europe with her first husband; her subsequent divorce and re–marriage to her creative sparkplug, Dillwyn Parrish, and his tragic suicide; and the child she carried from an unnamed father, the story of M.F.K. Fisher's life becomes as vibrant and passionate as her prolific words on wine and cuisine. Letters and journal entries piece together a dramatic life, but An Extravagant Hunger steps further, bridging the gaps between personal notes and her public persona, filling in the silences by offering an engaging and unprecedented depth of intuitive commentary. With a passion of her own, Anne Zimmerman is the careful witness, lingering beside M.F.K. Fisher through her most dramatic and productive years.

A Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry A New York Times Notable Book of the Year From the Winner of the Whiting Award, an American Book Award, and finalist for a Lambda, Tommy Pico's Feed is the final book in the Teebs Cycle. Feed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. It's an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks what's the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw and blizzard, but with a faith that even amidst the mess, it knows where it's going.

First published in 1942 when wartime shortages were at their worst, the ever-popular How to Cook a Wolf, continues to surmount the unavoidable problem of cooking within a budget. Here is a wealth of practical and delicious ways to keep the wolf from the door.

If Walt Whitman had come back to face America at the end of the 20th Century, these are the poems he might have written. Whether adapting the long Whitmanian line, reinventing the prose poem, or alternating lyric and prose meditations, Jon Davis has taken the measure of these times and found a world where virtue has been devoured by appetite, where the private and familial have been invaded by the tawdry, the commercial, and the vicious, as if our lives were hotwired to our television sets, our minds crackling with the loose electricity of an experiment gone wrong. In poems that are ambitious and political without being sententious or partisan, Davis turns to the power of words for a way to reconcile the irreconcilable, praising language as a rich, entangled, and inexhaustible source of solace and meaning. With Scrimmage of Appetite, Jon davis has fulfilled Wallace Stevens's image of a poet merciless / To accomplish the truth in his intelligence.