Blackwood: A Novel by Michael Farris Smith

Blackwood: A Novel – Michael Farris Smith – 9780316529815 – Little Brown – Hardcover – 256 pages – March 3, 2020 – $27.00 – ebook versions for sale at lower prices

This is pretty much a stunningly written book. I discovered the writing of Michael Farris Smith serendipitously through the southern culture magazine, Garden & Gun. I read a short piece they published called “How a Steadfast Pup Helped an Author Find His Voice,” which is just a fantastic work of personal memoir. That one essay prompted me to learn about Smith and to get a copy of his latest book. Yes, this is how literary discovery works today. There are so many good writers in the world, and we are blessed with a plethora of books to read. But at the same time, how do we find out about them? I had not heard of Michael Farris Smith before. Blackwood is his fifth book, and his work has been well reviewed and praised by writers whose opinions I respect. I was surprised I had never run across his work before, and pleased I did.

I started reading Blackwood without knowing very much about this writer or his past work, or the kinds of stories he tells. There is no doubt that Blackwood can be pretty dark at times – funnily, it reminded me of the great Netflix series, Stranger Things – though much more powerful in the way that only fiction can convey mystery. It can be scary at times, and there are characters in this book who are just terrible, dangerous figures. I don’t think you have to be a southerner or to have lived in the south at all to appreciate this book, or the kinds of people who inhabit the fictional Red Bluff, Mississippi, but it helps, I am sure, as the landscape and the mysteries Smith explores are very much “of the South” and the pain and suffering that resides in its countryside. That suffering is an integral element of the history of the people and the land that is palpable in this novel. The collection of characters is interestingly diverse, combining a bit of Faulkner with a touch of Stephen King, it seems.

I tend to think of this book as a novel of magical realism that taps into a mysterious darkness that inhabits the land itself. It is chthonic – almost literally. There is a part of this novel that is mythic, subliminal, deeply psychic in a wounded way, and the people who live in this strange place have become part of the mystery and part of the land as well. I wondered at times if Smith is telling a story that even he may not fully understand, almost like a Druid priest channeling voices from another reality. The book is very powerful, and that power makes it difficult sometimes to get your bearings, as a reader, you can feel outside the realm of your own experience enough that you must allow Smith’s language to transport you to this other place, and dream alongside and almost within the author’s psyche.

Some of the words used by reviewers come to mind – “brutal,” “supernatural,” “startling,”. All are accurate. I felt the pain of this novel deeply. And yes, it is a southern novel, but that should not ever be considered a limitation. This is just a great novel that happens to be set in the south.

I am really pleased that I discovered Blackwood and the work of this compelling writer, Michael Farris Smith. I’d like to especially thank the magazine Garden & Gun for doing what they do so well — exploring and expounding on modern southern culture. And thanks to Michael Farris Smith for taking the risk to write this difficult book, and for talking to me about it. We had a great conversation together.

“Lurking over Blackwood is a family of itinerant grifters—a version of Faulkner’s Snopes clan, forces of chaos, human kudzu except for the youngest of them, a mysterious boy in whom Colburn sees his young self. As in the best noir, A soul-strangling inevitability hangs over Red Bluff, yet somehow Smith gives his doomed characters a dignity in the face of forces well beyond their control.” Booklist (starred review)

Michael Farris Smith website.

Buy the book at RJ Julia Booksellers.

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Crooked Hallelujah: Kelli Jo Ford

Crooked Hallelujah – Kelli Jo Ford – 978-0-8021-4912-1 – Grove Press – Hardcover – 304 pages – July 14, 2020 – $26.00 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

Kelli Jo Ford’s novel is a deeply rewarding read. Comparisons to the work of Louise Erdrich are inevitable and unavoidable (and Kelli Jo mentioned Louise in our conversation as one of her most important influences.) This is a novel of relationships and family told through the voices of four generations of Cherokee women and to a lesser extent, the men who come in and out of their lives. The narrative weaves together strands of familial cloth into what emerges as a beautiful and compelling pattern that we experience fully as the story is told.

At the outset of the book, we are in 1974 in the Cherokee Nation, eastern Oklahoma, where fifteen-year-old Justine is growing up in a family dominated by women – her mother, Lula, and her mother’s mother, Granny. We follow Justine, and her daughter, Reney, through a series of challenges in Oklahoma and Texas and back to Oklahoma, where family and roots call out to her.

Kelli Jo Ford is a fine writer, and manages her characters and their stories well. Her intergenerational story is complicated, and the multiple narrative voices take some concentration to follow, but her writing is warm and deft, and we are rewarded in the end by the beauty and depth of her characters and their lives. This family of strong Cherokee women continually face challenges with strength and wisdom. They make the necessary sacrifices for the people in their lives and go on living despite all the difficulties they face. They don’t always get along – these women are real people, not caricatures. They do not always succeed in understanding each other or overcoming the difficulties and challenges they face. There are conflicts over religion and individuality. But these women are bound by blood, heart, and a deeply felt love that carries them forward despite all. I came away from this book with an appreciation for the strength and perceptiveness of Cherokee women.

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing published by Harper in 2012. She now lives in Virginia with her husband, poet Scott Weaver.

My conversation with Kelli Jo was her first interview about Crooked Hallelujah. She is a new writer many of us will want to follow in the years to come.

Author website here.

Support local business. Buy the book from R.J. Julia Booksellers.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk Interviews Howard Junker about Zyzzyva

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. I’ve spent time talking with people in the book industry about how publishing is evolving in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

Some time back, this series broadened to include conversations that go beyond the future of publishing. In an effort to document the literary world, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and into the present.

One of my favorite lines of exploration for Publishing Talks has been a series of conversations with editors and publishers of independent presses and literary magazines. These enterprises are at the core of literary culture. They bring new voices to light, tap into the always changing literary culture, and bring it forward to readers and importantly, to other writers as well.

One of the most important literary magazines of the late twentieth and early twenty first century is Zyzzyva: The Journal of West Coast Writers & Artists, founded by Howard Junker in San Francisco as a purely West Coast platform in 1985. Howard and I knew each other in the eighties and nineties when I was involved in literary magazine and press distribution. I’ve always thought highly of Zyzzyva, its look and feel and the breadth and scope of its literary vision. Having a chance to talk for awhile with Howard about the magazine and his own literary output since leaving the magazine in 2010 was a welcome pleasure. He has a lot to say on alot of subjects. I truly enjoyed our conversation and hope you will find it as interesting and rewarding as I did.

Howard Junker was born in Port Washington, NY and grew up in Chappaqua, NY. He attended Amherst, Stanford, and the University of San Francisco. Junker has written for many magazines, including Architectural Digest, Art in America, Artforum, Esquire, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, The New Republic, New York, Newsweek, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and Vogue.

He has also worked as a documentary filmmaker, television producer, construction carpenter, junior high school science teacher, fondue cook, P.R. flack, and technical editor.

He founded Zyzzyva in 1985, and edited 90 issues before he retired at the end of 2010. He also edited five anthologies of work from the magazine, including AutoBioDiversity, as well as four Zyzzyva first novels and three Zyzzyva first collections of poems. There is much more about Howard to be found at his website here.

Photo above by Dennis Letbetter.

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Fenton Johnson – At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life – Fenton Johnson- 9780393608298 – W.W. Norton – Hardcover – 256 pages – March 10, 2020 – $26.95 – ebook versions available at lower prices

So much of the pleasure of conducting this podcast for all these years has been (and continues to be) the discovery of new writers and books, that so deeply nurture my inner being. Discovering Fenton Johnson’s writing during the pandemic, where I have been spending most of my time alone or with just my immediate family, has been both apt and especially rewarding. I want to thank my cousin, Fred Hertz, for introducing me to Fenton and his work. I am especially interested in this book, as it is about the inner lives if writers, artists and musicians, their thought processes and creative lives, Fenton Johnson’s perspective on creativity and the artistic journey should resonate with us now more than ever.

Fenton is an outstanding writer, whose prose flows like a slow moving brook through the woods. I am really surprised not to have known about his work before now. Now, having read this most recent very personal memoir, I am adding his other works of memoir, and his fiction to my long term reading list.

But back to this book. In At the Center of All Beauty, Fenton explores the lives and works of nearly a dozen writers, painters and singers, those he feels most close to in his own life and work. He calls them “solitaries,” and links them to members of his own family, friends he knew growing up, his life, his lovers, his loves.  He rightly questions the dominant cultural narrative we all absorb that coupling is the highest and best way to live. Of course there is a long and celebrated tradition in the West of creatives who must separate themselves from others in order to be themselves, and this clearly is a crucial story for anyone involved in trying to create.

Fenton devotes chapters to Thoreau at Walden Pond, Emily Dickinson in Amherst, the great Bill Cunningham photographing in the streets, Cézanne repeatedly painting Mont Sainte-Victoire and Zora Neale Hurston, Nina Simone, and several other exemplars of the creative solitary life. Each of these stories relate back to Fenton’s own journey, first growing up in Kentucky near the famous Gethsemane monastery (best known as home to Thomas Merton,) his father and mother, also both solitary souls despite their family lives, and then  later living in San Francisco in the time of AIDS, to now, where in late middle age, he finds himself solitary and at peace with all that it means to be both alone and completely connected to the world around him.

This book is full of wisdom, of beauty, and of language that helps us go beyond our daily perceptions into our own stories of self and meaning. You can read this book as a narrative or perhaps as well, use it as an inspirational spur to personal meditation on self and beauty.

It was truly a pleasure to read At the Center of All Beauty and also to have the opportunity to speak with Fenton about this book. To illustrate life during Covid-19, while we happened to both be in Tucson, Arizona this spring, Fenton delivered the book to me, both of us wearing masks, in the local post office parking lot, and we conducted the interview via Skype, despite being less than two miles apart from each other on the day we talked.

Aside from At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, Fenton Johnson is the author of three novels: The Man Who Loved Birds, Scissors, Paper, Rock, and Crossing the River, each of which have been reissued in new editions. He has also published two previous memoirs, Geography of the Heart: A Memoir and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks and an essay collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays.

Geography of the Heart received the American Library Association and Lambda Literary Awards for best LGBT Creative Nonfiction, and Keeping Faith received a Lambda Literary and Kentucky Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction. He was recently featured on NPR’s Fresh Air and writes for Harper’s Magazine.

Fenton is professor emeritus at the University of Arizona and teaches creative writing workshops nationally. He is on the faculty of the low-residency creative writing program of Spalding University.

Support local booksellers! Buy At the Center of All Beauty from independent bookseller RJ Julia.

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Anne Enright: Actress – A Novel

Actress: A Novel – Anne Enright – 978-1-324-00562-9 – W.W. Norton – Hardcover – 272 pages – March 3, 2020 – $26.95 – eBook version available at lower prices

I think it is pretty safe to say that Anne Enright is one of the best writers of our time. Her writing is so well done that you don’t notice her deft ability to portray characters and tell their stories as if you were present at the time.

In some ways, Actress is an unusual novel, structured more like a memoir, albeit a fictional one. The story meanders the way a person might when telling a story about their parents and themselves. Ostensibly Actress is the story of Katherine O’Dell, the narrator’s mother. Norah, the daughter, is herself a writer in mid-career. But as I read the book, it became clear that this book is really about Norah, and while the daughter-mother relationship is central to her story, there are more layers than initially meet the eye here. It’s not so much a fictional portrait of an actress, but a fictional portrait of a writer.

Norah, the writer, has spent her life avoiding writing about her mother. Being the daughter of a famous, even notorious actress, is something she has tried not to deal with, even though it is the grounding of her own life story. That her mother ends up in decline is also defining for her. Katherine was a difficult, mercurial, highly private and complicated person. Her daughter, our narrator, is ultimately more like her mother than she wants to believe or accept. In Enright’s telling, the writer tells the story she must tell, even if it is not always the story she wants to tell.

Aside from being a terrific writer, Anne Enright is an outstanding conversationalist, making her a great subject for an interview. It’s pretty obvious how much I like speaking with writers about their books, and a conversation with Anne Enright is a joy. I am sure that you will enjoy listening to this interview and you will find this book well worth spending some time with. I had the pleasure to speak with her in 2015 about her last novel, The Green Road, another terrific book. Here’s a link, in case you want to listen to that conversation as well.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962, studied English and Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

She has written short stories that have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker and The Paris Review. In 2004 she received the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award for her short story, ‘Honey’. She has published three collections of short stories.

Her novels are The Wig My Father Wore (1995), shortlisted for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Literature Prize; What Are You Like? which was the winner of the 2001 Encore Award; The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002); The Gathering (2007) which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction; and The Forgotten Waltz (2011). Her most recent novel, The Green Road (2015) won the Irish Novel of the Year.

Enright is also the author of a book of humorous essays, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004). She lives in Ireland.

You can buy Actress online from RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut where it is a current Staff Pick.

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Naomi Shulman: Be Kind: You Can Make the World a Happier Place!

Be Kind: You Can Make the World a Happier Place! 125 Kind Things to Say & Do – Naomi Shulman – Illustrated by Hsinping Pan – Storey Publishing – 9781635861549 – Hardcover – $12.99 – June 25, 2019 – ebooks available at lower prices.

I learned about Naomi Shulman because of something she wrote a few years ago that has circulated widely. What she said resonated with my own thinking about our responsibilities as citizens:

“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.”

So I went in search of Naomi Shulman online, feeling like this would be someone I’d be really interested in talking to. I discovered she has also written this wonderful kids’ book, Be Kind, and was very happy to set up a chance to talk with her about this book and her thinking about the world. One thing we did address is the big difference between being nice and being kind.

Kindness seems like such a simple thing. But it really isn’t. Kindness requires empathy, connection with others, and being genuinely other directed. Kindness is something we all appreciate but recognize as not being generally practiced by so many of our fellow human beings and planetary citizens. Kindness is not passive either, as Naomi points out.

Be Kind helps parents and children aged 5 and up learn some simple, action-oriented things they can do in their daily lives to help them become active practitioners of kindness and love.

Naomi teaches kids that kindness is much more than being “nice,” to others. Some of the things she demonstrates include standing up for someone or something, engaging in a community, showing compassion toward others (beings as well as humans), and expressing gratitude. The illustrations by Hsinping Pan are absolutely perfect, as is Naomi’s writing. Though it’s small book, there are 125 concrete activities kids and their families can pick and choose from and act out. You can be the first person to say good morning to a friend, or pay someone a compliment, help elderly neighbors with chores, maybe just learning to say hello to an immigrant in their own language, or just sending a card to someone for no particular occasion.

Be Kind empowers kids to make the world a better, kinder place, and that is nothing but a good thing. I talked to Naomi about the book, her philosophy of living and teaching, and all sorts of things relating to politics and culture. It was a fun conversation for me, and I hope one that will help all of us during this particularly challenging time.

Being kind will help us get through the difficulties of daily life. And that includes being kind to ourselves.

Be Kind was a 2019 Mom’s Choice Award Gold Winner

“Be Kind is a lovely reminder that every moment can be filled with a thoughtful act of kindness. This beautifully illustrated book gives fresh and meaningful ways that each child — and adult — can make our world a happier place and prove that KINDNESS MATTERS!” — Jill McManigal, cofounder & executive director, Kids for Peace and The Great Kindness Challenge

Naomi Shulman lives with her daughters in Northampton, Massachusetts. She’s now a writer and editor, formerly having worked in book publishing at St. Martin’s Press, and was the research editor at Wondertime, a Disney parenting magazine. As a freelancer, she has worked in memoir, fantasy, literary fiction, mysteries, sci-fi and children’s books.

You can support local bookselling, which needs your support, by purchasing Be Kind from RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut. They fill online orders quickly – click here to order.

More of Naomi’s work can be found here.

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Writer and editor Richard Marek has died.

Dick Marek was a legendary book editor and later an extremely successful writer and ghost writer. He lived in Westport, Connecticut with his second wife, the writer and therapist, Dalma Heyn.

I had the honor to interview Dick for Writerscast in 2015, in which he talked at length about what many consider to be the golden age of American trade book publishing, of which he was an integral part. And I had the great pleasure to have worked with Dick and Dalma on one of their jointly written novels, A Godsend some years ago. He was a wonderful person and a uniquely talented literary being.

Dan Woog wrote a lovely piece remembering Dick for his great Westport centric blog 06880 (the quote by Dick below comes from Dan’s piece.)

Richard started as a junior acquisitions editor at Macmillan and worked my way up to becoming President and Publisher of E.P. Dutton. He edited James Baldwin’s last five books, Robert Ludlum’s first nine books and novels by Peter Straub, Thomas Harris, including The Silence of the Lambs, and also Ben Stein, and David Morrell. Marek was a novelist himself. His 1987 Works of Genius concerns the psychological takeover of his literary agent by a great (and narcissistic) modern writer.

Richard and Dalma were fixtures in the Westport literary community. Together they wrote How to Fall in Love: A Novel, which was published last year.

“Love is more important than anything else in this world,” Marek said shortly before he died. “If you’re lucky enough to have it — and write about it — you will have a happy life.”

We will miss you, Richard.

New York Times obituary here.

David J. Silverman: This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving – David J. Silverman – Bloomsbury – Hardcover – 9781632869241- 528 pages – $32.00 – November 5, 2019 – ebook versions available at lower prices

There have been a number of books I have read recently (and another I am reading now) that both challenge and retell the founding myths that power America’s beliefs about itself. In particular, I find books like David Silverman’s extraordinary work of historical storytelling, grounded in deep research and a new perspective so powerful, because they make us question and rethink stories and beliefs about ourselves we have come to take for granted.

Every culture tells its creation myths, establishing core values through historical story telling, that help shape the shared belief systems of the people who make up that culture. American creation myths tell stories that train our citizens to believe in the essential rightness of European settlement of the “virgin” territory now known as the United States to overlook not only the invasion and displacement of indigenous peoples, but to justify the way those peoples have been cast and treated subsequently by the dominant culture.

One of the most powerful of all historical American myths is that of the Pilgrims’ arrival in what is now called Plymouth, Massachusetts. The people who then lived along the eastern coast of America were primarily the loosely confederated Wampanoags, a tribal group that controlled most of what is now coastal Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

That creation story suggests that the Pilgrims were the first white people the Wampanoags met, and greeted them with open arms and friendship. In fact, by the time the Pilgrims landed on their shores, the Wampanoags had over 100 years’ experience with Europeans, including fishermen and explorers, and they had just gone through a horrendous five year period wracked by European diseases against which they had no anti-bodies, and their population and culture had been devastated. The Wampanoags, led by their sachem, Ousamequin (Massasoit), greeted this new group of visitors with a deep knowledge and understanding of who these newcomers were and what they might want. And they also had an extremely clear idea of how the Europeans could be positioned to help the Wampanoags in their ongoing territorial struggles with neighboring Massachusetts peoples, and other more distant tribes who frequently attacked them. Europeans came with guns and tools they would reasonably expect to trade with indigenous people in return for food and furs.

In March 1621, Ousamequin and the Plymouth colony’s governor, John Carver, agreed on their friendship and made an active commitment to mutual defense. That fall, the English, with the help of the Wampanoag, made their first successful harvest in their “New World.” When Ousamequin and some of his tribe visited Plymouth, they also helped create the “First Thanksgiving.” And the treaty made between the Wampanoags and the English remained functional, despite much friction and miscommunication between the two cultures, for more than fifty years, until King Philip’s War in 1675, when peace ended, and Wampanoags lost most of their power and land.

The relationship between Wampanoags and Europeans, then Americans, did not end, however, in the seventeenth century. The Wampanoags survived and have retained their culture against tremendous odds. In this book, historian David J. Silverman illuminates this long, fraught, and difficult relationship, even to modern times, from the perspective of the indigenous people, providing us with a powerfully different view of our history than we typically experience.

The story of the Wampanoags, who were among the earliest tribes in conflict with the European invaders, is one that was repeated many times across hundreds of years, with other tribes elsewhere across the North American continent. What the Wampanoags experienced through the last several centuries is a story that can help us all understand a truer picture of our country’s history, one we should all aim to better comprehend. And with a different perspective about our past, perhaps we will be able to create a better present for us all.

“David Silverman has crafted a gripping Native-centered narrative of the English invasion of New England. Finally, there is a book that vividly contextualizes the fabled first Thanksgiving, placing Native diplomacy and actions at the very center of the story, along with the warfare, dispossession, and struggle for sovereignty that was very much part of the longer aftermath of first contact. It is a story that continues into the present and a must read for every American.” – Linford Fisher, author of THE INDIAN GREAT AWAKENING

David J. Silverman is a professor at George Washington University, where he specializes in Native American, Colonial American, and American racial history. He is the author of Thundersticks, Red Brethren, Ninigret, and Faith and Boundaries. His essays have won major awards from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the New York Academy of History.

It was my great pleasure to speak with David Silverman about This Land is Their Land.

You can buy the book from RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut – they will deliver! Click here to purchase.

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Stanley Flink: Due Diligence and the News

Due Diligence and the News: Searching for a Moral Compass in the Digital Age – Stanley Flink – Center for Media and Journalism Studies at Indian River State College – paperback – 978-0-578-60291-2 – 214 pages – $19.95 – 12/7/2019 – ebook editions available at lower prices.

I was recently introduced to Stan Flink by a mutual friend. I’d known of him for many years as he was a Yalie of some renown, a journalist for many years who later became the editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine and taught journalism at Yale and at other institutions of higher learning.

With his long experience, as a reporter, editor and lecturer, Stan knows and understands the importance of the news media to the functioning of American democracy. Still active at 95 years of age, Stan has worked as a journalist and editor for many years, in many different venues and platforms.

Flink recognizes that democracy has no life without truth. In fact, democracy is predicated on there being an educated and active citizenry, that tries to know as much as possible the truth and nature of events and human affairs. In Due Diligence and the News, Stan reviews, succinctly and gracefully, the relationship between the press and American civic life from colonial days to the digital age. In a series of interlocked essays, he demonstrates succinctly and clearly that while opinions may differ, facts are not optional. He discusses the important question of how it can be possible to assure publication based on verifiable facts without curtailing differing opinions. This is a central issue for us all to face – understanding and resolving the difference between fact and opinion. We need both elements to have equal weight in our political discourse, and we cannot dismiss either.

Some of the questions he raises include:

How can the media restore the trust of the reading/listening public?

Is it ever possible for the news media to create mechanisms, like the Hutchins Commission, that can make workable rules of self-governance and professional standards for itself?

Can government—international, national, state or local—serve as a watchdog on the media without violating the Constitution?

Can the news media, assuming it is truthful, do less than full due diligence in commenting on a public official?

These questions are addressed thoughtfully throughout this well-written book, but no one, not even Stan, can answer them conclusively and for all situations. Ultimately, as Stan takes a look forward into the digital age, the age of learned intelligence, he poses what may be as yet unanswerable questions about the future of the press in our fast-changing society. I think we have alot to learn from this book and the questions that Stan provides are ones we should be discussing far and wide as we try to heighten the importance of truth among our fellow citizens.

STANLEY FLINK grew up in a New Jersey. He entered Yale University a few months after Pearl Harbor and soon after enlisted in the Army. After service in the Pacific, he returned to Yale to continue his education. He graduated in 1948 and became a correspondent for Time, Inc. in New York and then in California, where he reported on such people as William Randolph Hearst, Richard Nixon, and the first appearances of Marilyn Monroe.

In 1958 he transferred to television news at NBC and later CBS. In 1962 he took up a series of assignments in London where he lived for eight years. In 1972 he returned to Yale to become the founding director of the Office of Public Information. From 1980 to 2010 he taught an undergraduate seminar called “Ethics and the Media.” In 1994 he was awarded the Yale Medal.

Stanley Flink is the author of many articles and profiles, and among his books are a novel called But Will They Get It In Des Moines? about television, published by Simon & Schuster; and Sentinel Under Siege, an historical analysis of freedom of the press in America, published by Harper Collins.

Mr. Flink and his second wife (of 45 years) Joy, live in a retirement community in North Branford, Connecticut, where he still lectures on the media. Through it all, he has never lost his deep affection for golden retrievers. He celebrated his 95th birthday in May, 2019.

Watch this video of Stan talking about the ethics of journalism here.

Support independent bookselling by buying the book online from our friends at R.J. Julia Booksellers.

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Fuchsia Dunlop: The Food of Sichuan

The Food of Sichuan (A New and Updated edition of Land of Plenty)- Fuchsia Dunlop – Hardcover – 978-1-324-00483-7 – 480 pages – W.W. Norton – October 15, 2019 – $40.00 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

I love cooking and I particularly love cooking Chinese cuisine, and among Chinese cuisines, my favorite has always been Sichuanese. I am by no means an expert chef, but as an educated and somewhat experienced eater and cook, books like The Food of Sichuan are wonderful for me to read and learn from. Now having spent some time with the recipes, I can attest that this is a spectacular book for anyone interested in becoming a better cook of any form of Chinese cuisine.

Fuchsia’s writing about traditional Sichuan cookery is illuminating, and her knowledge and awareness the issues facing western cooks make this book a pleasure to work with. And it is a beautifully produced book – so much so that I have had to be extremely careful as I cooked from it, as I did not want to splash soy sauce or hoisin on any of the pages of the book.

Nearly twenty years ago, Fuchsia’s first book, Land of Plenty, was viewed by many to be one of the greatest cookbooks of all time. In this new book, Dunlop returns to the region where her own culinary journey began, adding more than 70 new recipes to the original selection and adding new writing as well.

The Food of Sichuan offers home cooks the tools needed to make a broad range of Sichuan dishes, ranging from the simple to the complex. The book includes beautifully reproduced food and travel photography, as well as Dunlop’s extensive writing about the culinary and cultural history of Sichuan, home of one of the great cuisines of the world.

Fuchsia Dunlop is a cook and food-writer specializing in Chinese cuisine. She is the author of the award-winning Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China (a collection of recipes from the Jiangnan or Lower Yangtze Region in eastern China), Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking; Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, an account of her adventures in exploring Chinese food culture; and two other now well-known books of Chinese cooking, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, and of course, the aforementioned Land of Plenty.

Fuchsia’s writing has appeared in many publications including Lucky Peach, Saveur, The New Yorker, and Gourmet. In the US, she has won four James Beard awards and was named ‘Food Journalist of the Year’ by the British Guild of Food Writers (GFW) in 2006. Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper won the IACP Jane Grigson Award in the US, and the GFW Kate Whiteman Award for Food and Travel in the UK. Most recently, Land of Fish and Rice won the 2017 Andre Simon Food Book of the Year award.

She is a restaurant consultant in London, and has also consulted and taught Chinese cookery for companies including Williams Sonoma and Marks and Spencer. Dunlop has spoken and cooked at conferences and events in China, Barcelona, California, New York, Sydney and Singapore, and as part of the Transart festival in Bolzano, Italy.

Fuchsia Dunlop grew up in Oxford, England, and studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge University, Sichuan University, and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She speaks, reads and writes Chinese.

‘The best writer in the West… on Chinese food’ — Sunday Telegraph

‘Fuchsia Dunlop joins the ranks of literary food writers such as Elizabeth David and Claudia Roden.’ — Independent

‘A world authority on Chinese cooking… Her approach is a happy mixture of scholarly and gluttonous.’ — Observer Food Monthly

Support independent bookselling – purchase The Food of Sichuan from RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut, they will send the book to you promptly.

Visit the author’s excellent and comprehensive website here.

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