I borrowed books in this series repeatedly as a girl. I knew exactly which shelves they were on. If that old library was still operational, I think I could find them in an instant. What I wasn't so sure of, was whether I would enjoy the stories as much as
Natalia Ginzburg's The City and the House (1985) Trans. Dick Davis This was Natalia Ginzburg's last published book, an epistolary work, which contains letters sent by a handful of Italian men and women who are struggling to understand their attachments to (and distances from) one another, those in
Fourth Estate, 2004 Antony Wild's Coffee: A Dark History One of the coolest bits of Antony Wild's work is waiting for readers in the appendix: The Find at Kush. And what is it? Well, this is non-fiction, right? So it's hardly a spoiler to say that they found
Jaspreet Singh's Chef Vintage Canada, 2008 Kirpal is on the train when he overhears a child ask her mother what people miss most when they die. He thinks, food. "We miss peaches, strawberries, delicacies like Sandhurst curry, kebab pasanda and rogan josh. The dead do not eat marzipan. The smell
Did you even know about these? The first was written by J.R.R. Tolkien to his children in 1920, and the collection was edited by Baillie Tolkien. (The last one, too, appears in the collection, although it's just a sampling of the oeuvre.) I discovered it this past autumn,
