Dwight Garner

Garner gathers a literary chorus to capture the joys of reading and eating in this comic, personal classic. Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for me, gone together. The book you’re holding is a product of these combined gluttonies. Dwight Garner, the beloved New York Times critic and the author of Garner’s Quotations, serves up the intertwined pleasures of books and food. The product of a lifetime of obsessively reading, eating, and every combination therein, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading is a charming, emotional memoir, one that only Garner could write. In it, he records the voices of great writers and the stories from his life that fill his mind as he moves through the sections of the day and this book: breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking, and dinner. Through his lifetime obsession with these twin joys, we meet the man behind the pages and the plates, and a portrait of Garner’s life, eager and insatiable, emerges. He writes with tenderness and humor about his mayonnaise-laden childhood in West Virginia and Naples, Florida (including his father’s famous peanut butter and pickle sandwich), his mind-opening marriage to a chef from a foodie family (“Cree grew up taking frog’s legs to school in her lunch box”), and the words and dishes closest to his heart. This is a book to be savored, though it may just whet your appetite for more.

On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

The Upstairs Delicatessen

Features more than 300 vintage book advertisements-- startling and strange, beautiful and funny-- that together reveal a kind of secret history of American literature over the last century.

a century of classic American book advertisements

Read me

A selection of favorite quotes that the celebrated literary critic has collected over the decades. From Dwight Garner, the New York Times book critic, comes a rollicking, irreverent, scabrous, amazingly alive selection of unforgettable moments from forty years of wide and deep reading. Garner’s Quotations is like no commonplace book you’ll ever read. If you’ve ever wondered what’s really going on in the world of letters today, this book will make you sit up and take notice. Unputdownable!

Dwight Garner

About

Books

Join the club