Secret Ingredients, Paperback

A sample of the menu: Woody Allen on dieting the Dostoevski way - Roger Angell on the art of the martini - Don DeLillo on Jell-O - Malcolm Gladwell on building a better ketchup - Jane Kramer on the writer's kitchen - Chang-rae Lee on eating sea urchin - Steve Martin on menu mores - Alice McDermott on sex and ice cream - Dorothy Parker on dinner conversation - S. J. Perelman on a hollandaise assassin - Calvin Trillin on New York's best bagel

In this indispensable collection, The New Yorker dishes up a feast of delicious writing-food and drink memoirs, short stories, tell-alls, and poems, seasoned with a generous dash of cartoons. M.F.K. Fisher pays homage to "cookery witches," those mysterious cooks who possess "an uncanny power over food," and Adam Gopnik asks if French cuisine is done for. There is Roald Dahl's famous story "Taste," in which a wine snob's palate comes in for some unwelcome scrutiny, and Julian Barnes's ingenious tale of a lifelong gourmand who goes on a very peculiar diet. Whether you're in the mood for snacking on humor pieces and cartoons or for savoring classic profiles of great chefs and great eaters, these offerings, from every age of The New Yorker's fabled eighty-year history, are sure to satisfy every taste.

About the Author:

David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998. A staff writer for the magazine from 1992 to 1998, he was previously The Washington Post's correspondent in the Soviet Union. The author of several books, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the George Polk Award for his 1994 book Lenin's Tomb. He lives in New York with his wife and children.