Book Scene | Princeton Magazine

Taste 101: A Lifetime Course in Cooking

By Stuart Mitchner

First things first, whatever the opposite of “foodie” is, I’m it. While my wife may also make faces at that precious little word, she fits the dictionary definition and then some of “a person who enjoys and cares about food.” Say the name “Yotam Ottolenghi” and her face lights up. Say it to me and I go “Duh?” My wife came of age in Los Angeles eating Mexican food along with other ethnic fare. I grew up in Indiana eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. If it were possible to estimate my consumption of PB&J, I might rate a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Until I met my wife, an artichoke was as alien to me as an ottolenghi.

VIBRANT VEGGIES

I spent a year in India without eating curry. Not until after the marriage vows did I take the spicy plunge, and now it’s the one thing I can cook without the help of a cookbook. Yet here I am, contemplating Yotam’s latest, Plenty More (Ten Speed Press $35). The subtitle says it’s about Vibrant Vegetable Cooking. If you look through the big full-color world of images between the covers, some 339 pages, the vegetables are nothing if not vibrant. They do everything but dance on the page. You can get drunk just looking at them. In fact, just looking at the one-word chapter titles on the contents page becomes an activity in itself. You get Tossed, Steamed, Blanched, Simmered, Braised, Grilled, Roasted, Fried, Mashed, Cracked, Baked, and Sweetened. Which, now that I think of it, is one way of describing what happened to me in India and on the way there and back. more

Local Author Debuts Supernatural Thriller at Princeton Public Library

Area resident Hester Young will be launching The Gates of Evangeline (G.P. Putnam’s $29.95), her debut novel, Wednesday, September 2, at 7 p.m., at the Princeton Public Library. The first in a planned trilogy, the book is about a grieving mother whose dark visions bring to light secrets that affect those around her.

In a starred review Publishers Weekly called The Gates of Evangeline “haunting, heartbreaking, yet ultimately hopeful….Young handles the spectral elements with restraint as her tremendously sympathetic heroine seeks to build a new life after death.” According to Kirkus Reviews, “the hothouse atmosphere of Evangeline and the tortuous and tangled motives of its denizens make for an enjoyable puzzle box of a mystery. An eerie but inviting debut.”

Jedediah Berry, author of the Hammett-prize winning The Manual of Detection, writes, “In Hester Young’s haunted Louisiana, the ghostly labyrinth of the past opens its great doors to deliver up a lush gothic thriller. The Gates of Evangeline is a darkly marvelous debut, a classic whodunnit stitched with otherworldly chills.” more

Great Authors To Follow On Twitter

By Taylor Smith

The wonderful thing about following your favorite writers on Twitter is that they suddenly become relatable. They are people with opinions, a sense of humor, and a life outside of their writing duties. more

Tracy K. Smith Named Director of Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet to head 75-year-old, unique undergraduate program

Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts named Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith as the new director of the University’s Program in Creative Writing. Smith, a Professor of Creative Writing on the Princeton faculty since 2005, succeeds National Book Award finalist and poet Susan Wheeler, who has led the program since 2011. more

Portraits of the New Architecture II

See how architectural photographer, Richard Schulman is capturing the faces behind the world’s most beautiful buildings

By Sarah Emily Gilbert

Images by Richard Schulman

Unlike paintings and other forms of art that are produced directly from hand to canvas, architectural designs require an intermediate step: construction. And while we may be left awestruck by the sleek enormity of a skyscraper or the matchless ambiance of a building, we often forget the brilliant architect behind its conception. more

Reading the World

By Stuart Mitchner

In his introduction to the 1946 Scribner’s edition of Henry James’s The American Scene, W.H. Auden observes that while travel is the “easiest subject for the journalist” who requires only “a flair for being on the spot where interesting events happen,” it is the most diffi cult for the artist, “who is deprived of the freedom to invent, free only to select and never to modify or add, which calls for imagination of a very high order.”

Except that, as Auden goes on to show, James found ways to invent, modify, or add, exploiting his “descriptive conceits” with rhapsodies on “the golden apples of the Jersey shore” and the pleasure of “being ever so wisely driven, driven further and further, into the large lucidity of—well, of what else shall I call it but a New Jersey condition?”

In Ruth Reichl’s Writings, Food Is Always the Star

By Anne Levin

Ruth Reichl is sometimes asked the question: If you had a superpower, what would it be? For the author, food writer and editor — formerly the restaurant critic at The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times and the editor-in-chief of the late and lamented Gourmet magazine, the answer is a no-brainer: To have a heightened palate.

“I wish I had it, but I so do not,” she said during a telephone interview last week. “Especially in my business, it would be a great asset.” Ms. Reichl will speak this Friday at a sold-out Book Lover’s Luncheon hosted by the Princeton Public Library and the Friends of the Library, at Springdale Golf Club. “The closest I’ve ever seen is Paula Wolfert, whom I traveled with once,” she continued. “She really does have an uncanny ability to pull flavors apart.” more

Getting Back to the Garden

By Stuart Mitchner

We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden…

That line from Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” has been singing in my mind ever since I began thinking about books on gardens for the spring issue. The sound that haunts me, however, isn’t from the composer’s version, but the one sung by Ian Matthews and backed by Gordon Huntley’s eloquent pedal steel guitar on the album Later That Same Year by Matthews’ Southern Comfort. Huntley weaves a spell of such beauty, no place but an earthly paradise could live up to it.

Of real world here-and-now gardens in my experience, I think of Hidcote near Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, which I visited with my wife and 10-year-old son at the time of his all-consuming fascination with plants and flowers, particularly exotic deadly ones (a year later it was electric guitars and exotic, deadly music). As it happens, Hidcote was the creation of an American expatriate named Lawrence Johnston, who settled in England in 1900 and began laying out the garden ten years later. During the same UK summer, we visited Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which shared the Arts and Crafts style of Hidcote, with its sequence of outdoor “rooms.” I was always the semi-reluctant hanger-on, for these visits took place when my wife was reading her way through the letters and journals of Sackville-West’s soulmate Virginia Woolf and my son was doing the same with field guides and botanical esoterica. more

Design Begins at Home

By Stuart Mitchner

Most of us grow up with an innate sensitivity to architecture and design. This primal design sense no doubt comes to life as soon as your parents hang a pretty mobile above your crib. As you grow up, you’re likely to develop an attachment to familiar objects, as I did, for one example, to the curtains that can be seen in photos of the duplex my parents were renting when I was born. The curtains moved with us from home to home and when we transitioned to a bigger house after I entered seventh grade, I asked that the surviving remnants be hung in my room, even though they were starting to show their age. The colors were warm and cozy, gold and a faded red, with fi ligree and medallions and knights on horseback; it was the design equivalent of comfort food. It was also a reminder of a happy, secure childhood. more

Life, Death, War and The New Yorker

By Stuart Mitchner

I grew up eating breakfast and lunch (and snacks) in the same room as a large threepart folding screen decorated from top to bottom with New Yorker covers. It was the only piece of furniture my parents owned that had no discernible purpose other than to be its own odd, cheery, colorful self. My Medievalist father, who was accustomed to working with illuminated manuscripts, had meticulously assembled and arranged it, making sure everything was precisely aligned. The screen, with all its vivid, amusing imagery refl ecting our familial infatuation with New York City was a companiable presence at a time when my diet consisted mostly of open-faced peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then and now the ultimate comfort food. more

Creative People: When Fashion Comes to Life

By Stuart Mitchner

“Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent with tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play.” – Henri Matisse

In my dissheveled outsider’s view, the fashion world is best approached when it relates to art or cinema or literature, or, as I’ve just learned, when it’s embodied by designers who live up to Matisse’s definition of creative people. After scanning some new fashion-oriented publications appropriate to the holiday season, I’ve found the virtues of curiosity, persistance, independence, a spirit of adventure and a love of play in people like fashion legend Loulou de la Falaise (1948-2011) and Alber Elbaz, the creative director of Lanvin. more

A Writer’s Faith

By Stuart Mitchner

Joyce Carol Oates had been living in Princeton for 25 years when she published The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (Ecco 2003), one of two works she named when asked to mention books that were “close to her heart.” The author, who will be teaching her last class at Princeton University in the spring semester of 2015, also cited High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories 1966-2006 (Ecco 2006), which contains “my favorite stories of my own up to that time.” more

School Days

By Stuart Mitchner

Every time the “back to school” theme comes up, I think of The Catcher in the Rye, New York City, and the year I went to McBurney School on 63rd Street off Central Park West. I was 16 when I read Holden Caulfield’s story for the first of many times, not knowing that J.D. Salinger had been at McBurney decades before me and that some of Holden’s school experiences and relationships were drawn from his two years there. more

Found In Translation

By Stuart Mitchner

Lost, lost, it’s always lost. Nobody talks about being found in translation but isn’t that what happens when the translator is delivering the goods? In winning the 2013 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for delivering Reiner Stach’s Kafka: Die Jahre der Erkenntnis into English as Kafka: The Years of Insight (Princeton University Press 2013), Princeton resident Shelley Frisch was praised for “finding fresh, compelling, and often witty ways” to sustain the biographer’s voice and “render his German into English.” more

Woods and Words: Wild Life Between the Cover

By Stuart Mitchner

When we lived in Hoosier Courts, a post-war housing project for married graduate students, Indiana University junior faculty, and veterans on the GI Bill, the garbage cans were in pits with heavy lids because we were on the edge of the wilderness, or so I was told by my parents. Older kids claimed there were mountain lions, bears, and wolves in the woods nearby, where my parents allowed me to explore during the day, in spite of the rumored wildlife. You could walk out your door and within a minute be hiking on the rocky cliffs overlooking the Illinois Central tracks. The pale green clapboard buildings were heated by pot-bellied stoves I got dressed in front of on cold winter mornings. It was at Hoosier Courts, between grades 4 and 6, that I began reading “real books.” more

High Times In A Wide-Open Town

By Stuart Mitchner

In May 1929 delegates to an Atlantic City convention worked out a fourteen point agreement that was a distorted mirror image of President Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” treaty negotiated ten years earlier at Versailles. Led by Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and other mobster kingpins, this particular summit also dealt with war and peace, armaments, and the spoils of war. more