Ms. Lust will visit the Norwich Bookstore at 7 pm on Wednesday, March 11th to discuss her latest book -- A Blissful Feast: Culinary Adventures in Italy's Piedmont, Maremma, and Le Marche. The book consists of portraits of the people who served as her culinary guides in her exploration of authentic Italian cuisine. Ms. Lust's first book, Pass the Polenta, a culinary memoir, is also available at the Norwich Bookstore.  

1) What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?

Consider the Oyster by M.F.K. Fisher. I received this slim volume as a gift from the
chef/owner of The Ark Restaurant and Bakery, where I held my first cooking job on
the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington State. My duties included shucking several
hundred oysters a day, so I had indeed spent much time considering oysters. I went
on to discover the rest of M.F.K. Fisher’s works, most of which appear in the
anthology The Art of Eating. Fisher confirmed for me that food was a subject worth
writing about. She echoed my appreciation for recipes as more than just lists of
ingredients and sets of instructions. I was struck by how she wove history, culture,
and personal anecdote into her writing, and her approach helped me see the layers of narrative contained in even the simplest dish.

First Person Rural by Noel Perrin (currently out of print). I took a class on Nature Writing from Noel Perrin while I was studying at Dartmouth, and he was instrumental in affirming my belief that eating is an environmental act. He found beauty and worth in the small things others overlook, and his evocation of these pleasures on the page helped me find merit in my own subject matter. He encouraged me to say what I had to say in words that suited me instead of in words I thought a real writer should use.

Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, especially when viewed through the lens of The
Elements of Style, by Strunk and White. I read Charlotte’s Web over and over as a
child, and it was always a favorite. When I picked it up as an adult to read aloud to
my children, I realized how carefully constructed it was. It has a perfect narrative
arc; there’s not a single unnecessary word, not a phrase out of place. Of course, this
was the message of Elements of Style. Some people now think Elements is a
musty old book for fuddy-duddies, but it helped me learn to construct a sentence, and then a paragraph, until finally I had enough momentum to complete an essay or
chapter. As a child, I always cried at the part where Charlotte dies. But as an adult,
the closing lines are what bring tears to my eyes: “It’s not often that someone comes
along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” Those are two
traits I aspire to myself.

2) What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why?

I’d welcome a cup of coffee with Grazia Deledda. She is the only Italian woman to have won a Nobel Prize for literature, which she was awarded in 1926. She received only an elementary school education, as was the custom for girls at the time, and she taught herself after that by reading everything she could get her hands on. She evoked the people, traditions, and rural landscape of her native Sardinia with an unvarnished clarity, much as the writer Wendell Berry captures the agrarian rhythms of his beloved Henry County, Kentucky. In fact, I’d love to facilitate a conversation between the two of them, for in different eras and continents they both maintained a spiritual connection to the land, they demonstrated an appreciation for family and rural communities, and they put a premium on cultivating a sense of place. Of course if we held this meeting in Nuoro, Deledda’s native village, the coffee would assuredly be good!

​3) What books are currently on your bedside table?

Too many! I’m currently reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck. While visiting my cousin in Monterey, California in the fall, I felt a rush of emotion as we passed through the Salinas Valley and other landmarks in Steinbeck country. My cousin gave me her copy of East of Eden, which I hadn’t read since just after college. I’ve found myself lingering over sentence after sentence, admiring his descriptions of landscapes and inner character at once rugged and fragile. Steinbeck has been said to have a unique ability to unite the human heart and the land, and that quality is very evident in this novel.

Next up is The Song of Trees, by David George Haskell, which has been described as “a love song to trees.” I’m looking forward to the interplay of biology, philosophy, and lyrical prose. Then: 

• Dubliners, by James Joyce
• Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain-- her classic memoir serving as a nurse for the
• British armed forces during World War I.
• Both Flesh and Not, by David Foster Wallace
• Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elizabeth Tova Bailey
• The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman (volume 2 in The Book of Dust)
• The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri​

I like to slip in an Italian title every few books to keep my language skills in use. The first book in the Italian pile is currently Marcovaldo, by Italo Calvino. This is a collection of connected short stories that I keep on my dresser to read and reread. Marcovaldo is the book’s main character. He is a poet and dreamer at heart; the stories chronicle his appreciation of and yearning for nature and his discontent at being trapped in the city.

Other titles in this stack include L’isola di Arturo (Arturo’s Island) by Elsa Morante, and Passaggio in Ombra by Mariateresa Di Lascia. This coming of age story, published after the author’s death in 1995, won Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize. An English language translation is due out soon, with the name A Walk in the Shadows (not yet available in the USA).

1. What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?

The shaping of a writer is an ongoing process, so the first book that comes to mind is not one I read as an aspiring writer but as I was finishing This Brilliant Darkness: The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison, one of my favorite essayists. There's a phrase in TThe Recovering, which is meditation on creativity, addiction, and sobriety that I think better explains what I'm trying to work toward with my writing these days than anything I could say myself: "the saving alchemy of community."

Leslie and I became friends years ago over our shared love for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book of words and pictures published in 1941 by James Agee and Walker Evans. It's been thrilling to see This Brilliant Darkness compared to Agee, not least because I'll never be anywhere near the writer he was. But there is, I hope, an affinity of ambition, a hope that one might find a different, or "new" nonfiction language for representing the real.

There's a related affinity with Joseph Mitchell's portraits of a man named Joe Gould in his collection of 1940s-60s New Yorker pieces, Up in the Old Hotel, my copy of which I bought for $5 from a homeless street book seller around two in the morning, after leaving St. Vincent's Hospital in the West Village, to which I'd taken a friend in a crisis. This was back in the early 90s, I was just out of college, I think, and I was taken by Gould's delusional dream of an Oral History of Our Times, which would be the longest book ever written, neverending, "'the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude,’” as Gould told Mitchell, “‘what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows,'... a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey." A story in which the ordinary is extraordinary, and everything matters. ​

2. What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why?

I'm working on a chapter about the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz for a new book about the books that can never be finished. Schulz was a strange, lonely little man who almost never left his hometown of Drohobych, where he worked as an art teacher and wrote two astonishing collections of stories of fantastical worlds contained within his family's apartment, The Street of Crocodiles and Under the Sign of the Sanatorium, and struggled to finish a vast novel called The Messiah. The novel was scattered to the winds when the Nazis killed him, but it lives on in fiction about the missing novel by Cynthia Ozick, David Grossman, Roberto Bolano, Philip Roth. I don't imagine Schulz would reveal too much of his oceanic imagination over coffee, but I think of a line from his story "The Booke" (an awkward translation of the Polish, ksiega, for a sort of sacred book, which to Schulz was the book yet to be written: "under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don’t we secretly clasp each other’s hands?" A little creepy, sure! So were his stories. But even more they were beautiful. I'd gladly hold Bruno Schulz's hand. ​

3. What books are currently on your bedside table?

Walking up the stairs... let's see... it's crowded...
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Are You Listening, a new eerie and gorgeous graphic novel of a road trip through the West Texas night by Tillie Walden (purchased at the Norwich Bookstore).

Erosion: Essays of Undoing, by Terry Tempest Williams, who just gave a deep and powerful reading in Norwich that bowled over both me and my ten-year-old daughter.

Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. Smith, purchased at the Norwich Bookstore, not yet read, which I bought not because Smith was the Poet Laureate of the United States but because one of my students, completely unaware that she was famous at all, fell in love with her poems. 
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Up the Junction, by Nell Dunn, a great little book, of reported sketches--drawings and in rich vernacular prose--of everyday working class life in early 1960s London, given to me by James Napoli, the founder of the Upper Valley's Junction Magazine. 

Casting Deep Shade, the poet C.D. Wright's last book, just published, with photographs by Denny Moers. It's about beech trees, which sounds, to me, very boring. If you think Moby-Dick is boring, you'll probably find this boring, too, but if not -- well, beech trees are Wright's white whale.

Agee on Film: In the 1940s James Agee was legendary-in-his-own-time film critic for The Nation. He didn't like much of what he saw and I've seen almost none of the movies about which he writes, but together his criticism is a story of an increasingly broken-hearted man trying to remember love.

Lilith's Brood, by Octavia E. Butler, a single-volume set of one of Butler's afrofuturist trilogies. Butler will be the final chapter in the new book that will begin with Schulz. Her unfinished book, which I wish I had on my bedside, was The Parable of the Trickster, meant to be the final volume of her final trilogy. All her books had been "NO" books, she said, dystopian, deeply critical of the world. In the final one, she said, she wanted to write a "YES" book, to imagine freedom and in doing so make it real. She died trying. ​

We are pleased to present our latest “3 Questions”, this time featuring Sydney Lea.
Mr. Lea, a poet and a former Pulitzer finalist, founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review. He has been active in literacy efforts and conservation, especially in Maine, where the land trust he chaired until 2018 conserved nearly 400,000 acres of working forest.

Mr. Lea will visit the Norwich Bookstore at 7 pm on Wednesday, November 13 to discuss Here, his thirteenth book of poetry and his twentieth book. 

1.What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?

Most important was Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, for showing that compelling poetry could be based on quotidian events and people.  I couldn’t choose a single Robert Frost book, but his fusing of formalist technique with an astonishing  rendition of common human speech remains exemplary. The last book on this list may seem a bit eccentric: Voss, by Australian novelist Patrick White, whose eye for detail simply grabbed me when I was starting as a poet. There are moments in my first book that are all but plagiaristic in this regard.  ​

2.What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why? 

That would be the novelist Anne Tyler, I suspect, because I believe I share with her a fascination with family values, to use a much-abused phrase, with the wide range of subjects implicit (I think of Wordsworth again) in everyday domesticity.

Ms. Kimball will visit the Norwich Bookstore at 7 pm on Wednesday, October 30 to discuss her latest book Good Husbandry. The book begins where her first memoir, the best-selling The Dirty Life, ends and explores such questions as -- How does one traverse the terrain of a maturing marriage and the transition from being a couple to being a family? How will the farm survive? What does a family need in order to be happy?

1.What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?

Pig Earth by John Berger – The first in his trilogy set in France that traces the evolution of agriculture from small scale peasant production to large scale industrial production, and what that meant for rural places and the people who live in them. He made me think more deeply about so many things, like farmers’ attachment to our communities, our land, and the seasons, and also about the frustrations of agricultural economics.

This event is free and open to the public. Please call 802-649-1114 or email info@norwichbookstore.com for additional information. If you can not make the event, and would like Mr. Salati to personalize Lawrence in the Fall ​for you, the Norwich Bookstore staff can help make this happen (with a bit of advance notice).

1. What 3 books have helped shape you into the illustrator you are today, and why?
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As a young reader, I loved anything involving Roald Dahl’s words and Quentin Blake’s drawings. If I had to pick one I might go with Fantastic Mr Fox (1968). Similarly, anything for kids by E.B. White. Charlotte’s Web (1952) with Garth Williams's drawings will forever be a favorite. Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story from China (1989) by Ed Young is captivating, masterfully elegant and truly thrilling.

All of these books helped me develop a love for reading and storytelling which I think has served me well as I collaborate with authors on their manuscripts.

Mr. Christakis will read from his latest book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of A Good Society at 7 pm on Wednesday, June 12th at the Norwich Bookstore. ​In Blueprint, Mr. Christakis discusses how natural selection has given us beneficial social features including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. He maintains this fact is often overlooked in the tendency of scientists to focus on the dark side of our biological heritage: aggression, cruelty, and prejudice. The book reminds us that with all our inventions (e.g., tools, cities, nations) we simultaneously hold innate inclinations to better society. Mr. Christakis has also written Death Foretold and co-authored Connected.

This event is free and open to the public, but reservations are recommended as space is limited. Please call 802-649-1114 or email info@norwichbookstore.com to save your seat. If you can't make the event, the Norwich Bookstore staff can ask Mr. Christakis to personalize Blueprint for you if you contact them in advance.

And now our "3 questions".

1.What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?

For my work, and for pleasure, I read a lot of nonfiction, so I will have to neglect mentioning the fiction I adore, like the Illiad or Pride and Prejudice.  I like big sweeping books, like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, or Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, and engaging focused books, like Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness.

An event celebrating Mr. Money's latest novel, Oh When the Saints, begins at 6 pm on Thursday, May 2nd and will be held at Salt Hill Pub in Lebanon. Oh When the Saints, is a coming of age story exploring the friends and memories you make when a student abroad. Rumor has it live Irish music will accompany his reading of passages from his novel during this event. The Norwich Bookstore will be there with copies of his collection for you to purchase and for him to sign for you. You can find Salt Hill Pub at 2 West Park, in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

​We are very excited to present this week’s “3 Questions” with author and Dartmouth lecturer Saul Lelchuk. Mr. Lelchuk grew up in the Upper Valley, earned a Masters degree from Dartmouth College and a Bachelors degree from Amherst College. He currently lives in Berkeley, California.

​Mr. Lelchuk will appear at 7 pm on Wednesday, April 10 at the Norwich Bookstore to discuss his debut novel Save Me From Dangerous Men. A debut novel that Kirkus, in a starred review, called “A timely and totally badass debut." In another starred review, Publishers Weekly said, “This intelligent, action-packed thriller will resonate with readers as it touches on such themes as domestic violence, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the intrusive potential of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence...But the book’s real appeal stems from its powerful, distinctive protagonist." We would like to note that many reviews compare his protagonist, Nikki Griffin, to Lisbeth Salander and Jack Reacher. We are pretty certain this ensures there will be a second book; but, you can ask him in person if you are lucky enough to attend this event.

​This event is free and open to the public, but reservations are recommended as space is limited. Please call 802-649-1114 or email info@norwichbookstore.com to save a seat. If you can't make the event, the Norwich Bookstore staff can ask Mr. Lelchuk to personalize Save Me From Dangerous Men for you if you contact them in advance.
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And now, our "3 Questions":

1.What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?

I’ll never forget the first time I read White Fang, by Jack London. Not just the pure adventure of it, the delightfully exotic setting of the Yukon Territory and Klondike Gold Rush, how it opened a door to a fascinating historical time and place that I had never encountered. It was also one of the first times I realized how powerful a book, a story, could really be: I didn’t want to do anything until I had finished it. I didn’t do anything, in fact, until I had. There’s a reason why London was the single most popular American writer of his time, after all, and this book showed me, plain and simple, how the written word can be transportive in a way that really is unmatched.

2.What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why?
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I was named after Saul Bellow, and although my family knew him well when I was a boy, I never had a real conversation with him as an adult, and then he died while I was in college, although by that point I hadn’t seen him for a number of years. Bellow was someone so brilliant – to read one of his novels is to learn, page by page, about an astounding number of things – not just of people, of character and emotion, but pages filled with this kind of dazzling minutia of absorbed knowledge, everything from men’s style and fashion, to philosophy, to music, to linguistics, to botany… I would very much love the chance to have gotten to talk with him one on one, as an adult.

3.What books are currently on your bedside table?

Yikes.. my bedside table has seemed to evolve into a horizontal bookshelf! At the moment I’m reading a trilogy of Ross Macdonald novels (The Zebra-Striped Hearse has been my favorite so far), Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (read the first one, loved it, and immediately picked this one up), The Only Story by Julian Barnes, a book of Carson McCullers short stories, The Ballad of the Sad Café, and another collection, The Refugees, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, With Shuddering Fall by Joyce Carol Oates, and halfway through A Gentleman in Moscow, which I absolutely love. I also just picked up Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman, because somehow I’ve never read this, and a great biography of Allan Pinkerton by James MacKay.

1.What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?
The three books that have shaped me as a writer have to be: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, and Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee. I read all three of them when I was young, and their defiant black girl protagonists who were determined to live lives different from the ones their parents’ planned for them were crucial to my self-development as a writer and a person. All of them are daring stories right down to the level of the sentence. The language in Their Eyes Were Watching God ranges from the thundering resonance of the Old Testament to the earthy vernacular of the Deep South. The piercing rhythms of Jamaica Kincaid’s sentences startle and penetrate me now as much as they did when I first read the book. The protagonist in Sarah Phillips was the first black female character I ever met in whom I saw myself. I’ll probably spend my whole life trying to match the elegance of Andrea Lee’s prose.

2.What author (living or dead) would you love to have a cup of coffee with?
I don’t know if I would be able to keep my hands from trembling long enough to hold a cup of coffee steady, but I would love to be in the presence of Walt Whitman. Like his poetry, Whitman was full of passionate energy, so I’m not sure how patient he would be the domestic ritual of a 21st century coffee klatch. I think I would suggest that we take our coffees with us on a walk through some tiny, quiet town in Vermont in the fall, or a street fair in Brooklyn in the summer, or anywhere, anytime. And I would definitely want to meet Whitman only in the present—I’m confident his attitudes about race would have matured with the times.

3.What books are currently on your bedside table?
I am deep into Becoming by Michelle Obama. Next up is Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger (I was lucky to get an advance copy), a book that reminds me of the power and necessity of intimate friendship between women.

1.What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today?
McDoodle Street by Mark Alan Stamaty. I came across a book of this self proclaimed “famous comic strip novel” in the early 1980s. Besides being hilarious, I was charmed by its improvisational nature and it opened up new ways for me to approach comics making. I’m thrilled to see this book being reissued this year.

Fritz The Cat by R. Crumb. Full of vivid details, Crumb’s artwork and writing was both slap dash and masterful and, deceptively, made cartooning look like the most obvious course to take.

Maus by Art Spiegelman. I reread this almost every year and continue to learn from it.

2.What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why?
Maybe someone who was known as a grand raconteur like Dorothy Parker? Or someone who witnessed history with such clear eyes like Joseph Roth? Or better yet, how about H.L. Mencken? I bet it would be fun to speak with him about this historical moment. It seems like every quote of his I come across is spot on: “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”