This collection of interviews captures the conversations of a writer about whom the Chicago Sun-Times says, "She is to literary prose what Sir Laurence Olivier is to acting or Willie Mays is to baseball." These interviews reveal M.F.K. Fisher's fierce wit and her uncompromising and frequently contradictory attitudes toward the luxuries and necessities of gastronomy - the idea that sensual appreciation, in all aspects of life, is or should be necessary.
Fisher identifies a variety of human cravings and the means to find nourishment in what is the most intimate of the five volumes in North Point's jacketed paperback series, now complete.
M. F. K. Fisher, whom John Updike has called our “poet of the appetites,” here pays tribute to that most enigmatic of ocean creatures, the oyster. As she tells of oysters found in stews, in soups, roasted, baked, fried, prepared à la Rockefeller or au naturel—and of the pearls sometimes found therein—Fisher describes her mother’s joy at encountering oyster loaf in a girls’ dorm in the 1890s, recalls her own initiation into the “strange cold succulence” of raw oysters as a young woman in Marseille and Dijon, and explores both the bivalve’s famed aphrodisiac properties and its equally notorious gut-wrenching powers. Plumbing the “dreadful but exciting” life of the oyster, Fisher invites readers to share in the comforts and delights that this delicate edible evokes, and enchants us along the way with her characteristically wise and witty prose. “Consider the Oyster marks M. F. K. Fisher’s emergence as a storyteller so confident that she can maneuver a reader through a narrative in which recipes enhance instead of interrupt the reader’s attention to the tales. She approaches a recipe as a published dream or wish, and the stories she tells here...are also stories of the pleasures and disillusionments of dreams fulfilled.”—PATRICIA STORACE, The New York Review of Books “Since Lewis Carroll no one had written charmingly about that indecisively sexed bivalve until Mrs. Fisher came along with her Consider the Oyster. Surely this will stand for some time as the most judicious treatment in English.”—CLIFFTON FADIMAN
First published in 1942 when wartime shortages were at their worst, the ever-popular How to Cook a Wolf, continues to surmount the unavoidable problem of cooking within a budget. Here is a wealth of practical and delicious ways to keep the wolf from the door.
This contains the author's five most popular books - "Consider the Oyster", "The Gastronomical Me", "Serve it Forth", "How to Cook a Wolf", and "An Alphabet for Gourmets". The volume contains an array of thoughts, memories and recipes.
In Among Friends M. F. K. Fisher begins her recollections in Albion, Michigan, but they soon lead her to Whittier, California, where her family moved in 1912, when she was four. The "Friends" of the title range from the hobos who could count on food at the family's back door to the businessmen who advertised in Father's paper—but above all they are the Quakers who were the prominent group in Whittier. Mary Frances Kennedy found them unusual friends indeed, in the more than forty years that she lived in Whittier she was never invited inside a Friend's house. Her portraits of her father, Rex—her mentor, himself the editor of the local newspaper—her mother, Edith, and the other members of her family are memorable and moving. Originally published in 1970, Among Friends provides a fascinating glimpse into the background and development of one of our most delightful and best–loved writers, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher.
In these fifteen remarkable stories, M.F.K. Fisher, one of the most admired writers of our time, embraces the coming of old age. With a saint to guide us, she writes, perhaps we can accept in a loving way "the inevitable visits of a possibly nagging harpy like Sister Age" But in the stories, it is the human strength in the unavoidable encounter with the end of life that Fisher dramatizes so powerfully. Other themes—the importance of witnessing death, the marvelous resilience of the old, the passing of vanity—are all explored with insight, sympathy and, often, a sly wit.
Christened by John Updike as the "poet of the appetites," M.F.K. Fisher changed the way Americans understood the art of living. But she was also a master mythologizer. This multifaceted portrayal is no less memorable than the personae Fisher crafted for herself.
The final volume in a trilogy of selections from the journals, short stories, and correspondence of one of America's best-loved writers. With style, humor, and spare, elegant prose, Fisher retraces her adventures in France as a young housewife, recalls her return to California, and ruminates on such favorite themes as food, literature, and relationships.
When Robert Lescher died in 2012 an unpublished manuscript of M.F.K. Fisher's was discovered neatly packed in the one of the literary agent's signature red boxes. Inspired by Fisher's affair with Dillwyn Parrish — who was to become her second husband — The Theoretical Foot is the master stylist's first novel. In it she describes the life she all–too–briefly had with the man she'd ever after describe as the one great love of her life. It tells of a late–summer idyll at the Swiss farmhouse of Tim and Sara, where guests have gathered at ease on the terrace next to the burbling fountain in which baby lettuces are being washed, there to enjoy the food and wine served them by this stylish American couple. But all around these seemingly fortunate people, the forces of darkness are gathering: The year is 1939; World War II approaches. And the paradise Tim and Sara have made is being besieged from within as Tim — closely based on Parrish — is about to suffer the first of the circulatory attacks that will cause him to lose his leg to amputation.
