Barrett Bookstore is thrilled to announce an evening with book critic and author Dwight Garner as we celebrate the release of his new book: The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, & Eating While Reading. Dwight will be in conversation with Barrett Bookstore's Marketing and Event Director Page Berger.
This will be an evening *filled* with food, cheer, conversation, and books. On tap: martinis and muffalettas, potato chips and Hydrox Cookies, recitations and recipes, and of course, a deep dive into the controversial peanut butter and pickles sandwich. Come hungry, come curious, come ready to celebrate.
ABOUT THE UPSTAIRS DELICATESSEN
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, simply 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 of this book: breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking, and dinner.
Through his lifelong infatuation with these twin joys, we meet the man behind the pages and the plates, and a portrait of Garner, eager and insatiable, emerges. He writes with tenderness and humor about his mayonnaise-laden childhood in West Virginia and Naples, Florida (and about his father’s famous peanut butter and pickle sandwich), his mind-opening marriage to a chef from a foodie family (“Cree grew up taking leftover frog 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.
ABOUT DWIGHT GARNER
Dwight Garner is a book critic for The New York Times and was previously the senior editor of The New York Times Book Review. His essays and criticism have also appeared in The New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, Slate, and other publications. He is the author of Garner's Quotations.
