The woman who many years ago introduced me to Rachel Cusk had a particular Cuskian quirk that I remember well.

The Iliad By Homer, translated by Emily Wilson W.W. Norton & Company, 848 pages, $39.95 In 2017, the classicist Emily Wilson became famous for her translation of Homer’s Odyssey, the opening line of...

Whipping up recipes from a fictional 1930s creek picnic.

I arrived in Glasgow to meet Alasdair Gray with a tape recorder and a list of questions, determined to keep to myself the belief that he should love me.

Rosemary mint lemonade, sausage soup with cornmeal dumplings, blackened sticky molasses ribs, and tea cakes.

On a spring day seven years ago I was driving across Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn feeling . . . .

The dish arrives buoyed by boat metaphors, drawing a parallel between Mrs. Ramsay’s quest to serve dinner and her husband’s to sail to the lighthouse.

On a spring day seven years ago I was driving across Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn feeling . . . .

A simple summery Russian menu for the evil characters in ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’

Bitter Water Opera, the debut novel by Nicolette Polek published on Tuesday, asks exciting, original, and urgently relevant questions about the value and role of art.

Until yesterday afternoon, Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. (better known to readers as Cormac) was the greatest living American writer – many would say the greatest living writer, full stop.  The heir to...

Valerie Stivers dreams up a meal fit for a Sicilian prince, including delicious minestrone, a big drum of pasta, and CBD oil–infused granita.

“Kafka’s characters are often hungry.”

Oyster soup, sweet-and-sour pork bones, steamed spinach buns, and coconut pudding with lychee and mango.

To honor the author of ‘Moby-Dick,’ Valerie Stivers chases her own white whale: the perfect chowder.

Making poppy-seed pastries and marinated mushrooms from ‘Village Evenings Near Dikanka’

Asparagus mousse, rainbow-carrot soup with winter clementines, sausage rolls, and a Victoria sandwich cake

With the help of a friend, Valerie Stivers cooks ika daikon, nabe-pot stew, and chestnut-and-millet dumplings inspired by the work of Kenji Miyazawa.

Tomato salad, classic cassoulet, and cherry clafouti with the child-of-nature star of the belle epoque literary scene.

By age and disposition, I am only a reluctant convert to the cult of Honor Levy, author of one of 2024’s more anticipated and controversial debuts.

Valerie Stivers salutes Richard Brautigan with watermelon, trout, and more watermelon.

As Pavese once said, if you live in Piedmont, you “have the place in your bones like the wine and polenta.”

It’s telling of the low quality of major-media literary criticism that Cormac McCarthy’s new masterpiece has yet to be adequately recognized. The Passenger and Stella Maris, a conjoined new work by...

A speculative yet delicious dinner party on the planet Winter: hot beer, “sube-eggs,” and “gichy-michy” bars

Valerie Stivers makes bread, pork chops, and a simple summer pie as a tribute to literature’s most notorious outcast.

To honor Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s particular mixture of comfort read and Russian tragedy, Valerie Stivers makes futuristic cozy food.

One of the few photographic traces of the famously reclusive author Thomas Pynchon is a picture taken in 1965 outside of his apartment at 217 33rd Street, Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles County. Outside...

Valerie Stivers cooks up a menu inspired by Shirley Jackson, including dandelion pie, peanut brittle, and deathly sweet blackberries.

Valerie Stivers makes a salad, red rice, French bread, oysters with mignonette, and a crown roast of pork inspired by the books of James Baldwin.

The title and marketing of Andrew Boryga’s debut novel, Victim, promise a critique of the social-justice values that have come to predominate in works released by Big Five publishers.

Cumin-crusted lamb ribs, souvlaki-style "Moscow Ring," vegetables with tzatziki, and fig tart with honey caramel.

The writer Mohsin Hamid has made a literary career of topical novels addressing elite, liberal preoccupations, often beautifully. He is known for the 9/11 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2008),...

This is the fifth installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column.    The decline of the continental European aristocracy just before World War I doesn’t sound like a promising period for food...

Writer Valerie Stivers joins us to discuss Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking. Originally published in 1955, this cookbook celebrates the fleeting freshness and enduring joy of the summer season. We...

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida By Shehan Karunatilaka W.W. Norton & Company, 388 pages, $18.95 The Booker Prize, one of literature’s most prestigious, chooses “the best” novel written in English...

Valerie Stivers cooks with James Salter the only way she knows how: by throwing a plated five-course dinner party for fourteen people, complete with wine pairings and gourmet meat loaf.

Earth Angel By Madeline Cash Clash, 160 pages, $16.95 There is a popular school of literary short fiction that could be loosely described as “hapless people drowning in the garbage culture.” There...

The Shards By Bret Easton Ellis Knopf, 608 pages, $30 The writer Bret Easton Ellis, whose new novel The Shards was published Tuesday, has distinguished himself in the past decade by being one of a...

It’s telling of the low quality of major-media literary criticism that Cormac McCarthy’s new masterpiece has yet to be adequately recognized. The Passenger and Stella Maris, a conjoined new work by...

Whole baked whiting, mustard-and-cress salad, jam tarts, and meringue swans with blood-orange crème anglaise.

The solution, to his mind, was simple, if far from easy: abstinence.

Essayist Valerie Stivers pays tribute to the late Nobel novelist Sigrid Undset (1882 - 1949).

To celebrate the fourteenth-century plague epic ‘The Decameron,’ Valerie Stivers cooks up a five-course, all-chicken tasting menu.

The West’s urban-rural divide has arguably never been more febrile than it is today. Farmers and others who toil to make basic commodities available, in particular, find themselves sharply at odds...

“My favorite element of the meal was the subtle geranium cream with blackberries.”

Greek Lessons by Han Kang Translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won Hogarth, 192 pages, $26 In Greek Lessons, a new novel from Korean author Han Kang out in translation on April 18, a female...

Valerie Stivers draws up a menu inspired by Mikhail Sholokhov’s ‘And Quiet Flows the Don.’

Egyptian coffee, basbousa cake, aish baladi flatbread, and Circassian chicken with hazelnut sauce.

“Kafka’s characters are often hungry.”

George Saunders is known as a proponent of kindness, both in his persona and in his books. He is often referred to as the nicest guy in fiction, and is credited for developing a style of freewheeli...

The novel 'Pather Panchali, Song of the Road' inspired not only a Satyajit Ray film, but this delicious meal of Bengali treats

Ogbono Soup with Foo Foo Balls, Homemade Fish & Chips, Stained Glass Jell-O Cake

It’s telling of the low quality of major-media literary criticism that Cormac McCarthy’s new masterpiece has yet to be adequately recognized. The Passenger and Stella Maris, a conjoined new work by...

“I’ve been clean for over twenty years.”

To cook from the stories of the fabulous Bruno Schulz, you’ll need pitted cherries, yeast, and a Dungeness crab.

Melon balls stuffed with pheasant, surrealist salad, wild boar chocolate ragù, and rhubarb tart à la mode.

Nothing Sacred: Twelve Original Stories Edited by Bernard Schweizer and James Morrow Heresy Press, 280 pages, $19.95 Nothing Sacred is an anthology of short stories published this month by Heresy...

“The food in the novel reflected a transitional time in American cuisine, when cooking from cans was still respectable but the from-scratch movement was in its embryonic stages.”

Hilst’s books are filled with odd uses of food: blouses smelling of apples, penises like “wise and mighty catfish,” and beans as testicles.

Buttermilk biscuits, steak and caramelized onions, smoked pork soup with black-eyed peas and mustard greens, and lemon chess pie.

The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac By Louise Kennedy Riverhead, 304 pages, $27 The oddly titled The End of the World Is A Cul de Sac, a debut collection of short stories by the Irish writer Louise...

By age and disposition, I am only a reluctant convert to the cult of Honor Levy, author of one of 2024’s more anticipated and controversial debuts.

Valerie Stivers tries her hand at making Taiwanese food: hand-pulled egg noodles, thick pork soup, bubble-tea cream puffs, and more.

In recent decades, the American culture industry has been fixated on the need to lift up “POC voices”—so long as these voices tell a particular type of story focused on marginality, deprivation, and...

Cook an October feast of agua de lima and scary soup to pair with Amparo Dávila’s tales of domestic horror.

The Iliad By Homer, translated by Emily Wilson W.W. Norton & Company, 848 pages, $39.95 In 2017, the classicist Emily Wilson became famous for her translation of Homer’s Odyssey, the opening line of...

Bitter Water Opera, the debut novel by Nicolette Polek published on Tuesday, asks exciting, original, and urgently relevant questions about the value and role of art.

Valerie Stivers cooks from Iris Murdoch’s Booker Prize–winning ‘The Sea, the Sea,’ a novel full of eccentric food and cooking instructions.