"Authors" news and stories

I was the kind of kid who was always reading at the dinner table, obliviously dipping the corner of my Judy Blume novel in the macaroni until my mother told me to "put the book away!" Eating and reading still go together for me - I eat alone in restaurants a lot while traveling for work, so I always carry a book to keep me company. This week I'm reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, which, at almost 1,000 pages, is a bit awkward to hold aloft above my plate.

So I really enjoyed reading a piece in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review, in which Leanne Shapton asks various authors to name the book they most enjoy reading during solo dinners. The results are often unexpected. "Bright Lights, Big City" author Jay McInerney is the only writer to cite a food-related book - A.J. Liebling's gastronomic memoir "Between Meals." "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" author Junot Diaz chooses Michel Faber's "Under the Skin," though he says the aliens-eating-humans scenes will turn you into a vegetarian. Israeli writer Etgar Keret says reading Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" had him laughing and crying into his food at a Chinese restaurant.

Do you have a favorite book to take to restaurants for solo meals? What are you reading over the dinner table this week?

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An essay in today's New York Times Magazine muses on the cookbooks of James Beard, the pioneering American chef and food writer.

There seem to have been two Beards, writes Aleksandra Crapanzano - the sophisticated gastrophile with a taste for sea urchin mousseline, who awakened mid century Americans to the pleasures of fresh, high-quality ingredients, and the shameless crowd-pleaser and businessman, writing recipes for tomato soup cake and signing countless endorsement deals for kitchen products.

A new edition of "Beard on Food" loses the bad Sloppy Joe recipes found in Beard's seminal "American Cookery," and is instead full of the exuberant eater's musings - tales dining of pheasants in Provence, a digression on the history of fondue in Switzerland, Crapanzano writes.

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The 2006 Miami Book Fair is coming up in just a few short weeks and it is a great place to get up close and personal of hundreds of celebrated authors from around the world. Of course, we have a particular interest in the food writers and cookbook authors who will be there and after seeing the list of attendees, we were not disappointed. Food lovers will see:

• Wine writer Jay McInerney
• Jennifer Rubell, author of Real Life Entertaining
• Fit and fast food writer Linda Gassenheimer
• Caterer, cook and author Diane Goodman
• Havana Salsa author Viviana Carballo
• And the "it" chef/writer of the moment, Anthony Bourdain

Slashfood readers can expect to see the works of these authors, as well as several others, featured here leading up to the Fair. Others in attendance will be authors of the non-food persuasion and include Isabel Allende, Nora Ephron and Thomas Cahill.

On top of the opportunity to interact with the authors and attend wonderful seminars, there is also a huge street fair that goes along with the event, where visitors will find everything from books and art to food and drinks from around the world. Since it's Miami, expect to see lots of Cuban and Caribbean offerings.

The Book Fair will be Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College's Wolfson Campus from November 12 – 19, 2006.

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