November, Linked
turkey for you, turkey for me...
Good Morning.
Happiest of Thanksgivings to those of you reading stateside. With gratitude, today’s monthly round-up post, which would usually be behind a paywall, is free for all. Wishing you and yours a peaceful holiday with time to rest, recharge, and refocus for the busy season ahead.
In November, we:
Fancied a new cookbook featuring a spam cocktail
Mourned the passing of trailblazing “slow food” chef Skye Gyngell
Wondered who knows someone to get us in at the ground level for a new food media startup headed up by Max Tcheyan, formerly of Puck and The Athletic.
Listened to J Lee and the new FeedMe podcast, Expense Account.
Cursed Apple for not telling us the exact release date of “The Unlikely Cook with Awkwafina.”
Started following Elazar Sontag, the new Washington Post restaurant critic.
At the behest of Robert Sietsema, planned a NYC taco tour.
Updated ye old NYC to-do list with the 21 best things Grub Street staffers ate and drank all year.
Dined at Wild Cherry, five stars, no notes (besides don’t sleep on the scungilli).
🥘 Alison and Clare and Jess and Annie and Deuki and Matt and Dorie and Joshua
You would be forgiven if you believed it no longer permissible to produce a book with anything but screamingly bright primary colors and bubble letters. Amongst the embarrassingly large stack of cookbooks threatening to take over my kitchen counters, the above chefs/authors and below books, all procured in the second half of 2025, stand out not only for bucking current trends but for all-around cookery excellence.
There are many things to like: erudite writing so well-crafted it feels as if you are having a chat on the sofa next to a wood-burning fire or sipping sake in a starkly spare white-tiled noodle shop while debating when the AI bubble will burst. There are pictorial travelogues (Koreaworld) and pencil drawings with clear instructions and simple ingredients (The King Cookbook). Wallpaper-like endpapers enveloping pantry staple feasts (Something From Nothing). Gorgeously realistic paintings from Nancy Pappas depicting all manner of cakes (Dorie’s Anytime Cakes). Recipes that hit 100 percent of the time (Six Seasons of Pasta).
📚 Ruth Reichl Should Be a Bookseller
La Briffe, Ruth Reichl’s dispatch of old menus, new recommendations, and snapshots into the life of one of our generation’s greatest food writers and editors, is a weekly gift. Every so often, she shares a list of solid book recommendations; earlier this month, a humdinger of a list dropped. If one were curating a syllabus for an independent food writing study, this would be an excellent place to start.
🍴All Praise to the Lunch Ladies
Amidst all the worrisome news about food policy and lasting effects of the government shutdown, a loving tribute in the latest issue of The Bitter Southerner to the women who feed America’s children. Accompanied by stunning photographic portraits, this essay is a gentle reminder of all the quiet warriors carrying on with the day-to-day work of filling in the gaps of an oft-broken food system, finding sustenance for themselves in the process.
🦪 Who Was the Foodie?
Alicia Kennedy, writing in The Yale Review, wonders at what role responsibility plays in the current definition of the ubiquitous, if overfamiliar term, “foodie.” Alongside an historical examination of the term, Kennedy shares a close read of two new volumes from Ruby Tandoh and Marion Nestle (sidenote: I happened to be in Kitchen Arts and Letters doing a bit of proposal research while Nestle was signing stock a few weeks back. What fun to be a silent fly on the wall while she chatted away with the staff).
🗓️ Tamar Adler
Last week I received a copy of Feast On Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day complete with a kind personal note from Tamar (we did an event together a few years back) that challenges the reader to figure out how they want to read it. Written in a daily meditation format, it echoes another favorite constant desk companion, Patti Smith’s A Book of Days. This, undoubtedly, would make a splendid gift.
“I noticed repetitions, which shouldn’t have surprised me, but did. Delight appeared in the morning, or in quiet moments of cooking that required focus-measuring rice, seasoning meat, choosing the odd bit in most need of use. Tastes and smells were incendiary in those circumstances. I became alert, extra keen, extra aware. I learned that if a day seemed dull, or if I seemed dull and unavailable to delight, I should read a bit of a cookbook I love, or a poem about food. Or just get up and cook.”
🍗 St. John’s Founders Are Stepping Back
The charm of St. John is in the food, sure, but equally as important, the storied hospitality. I’m taken with the methodical thoughtfulness of Gulliver and Henderson’s succession plan.
“What Gulliver and Henderson’s partnership seems to rest on is a shared understanding of hospitality. Both, independently, tell a story about Fernand Point, the legendary French master chef, and how he would begin every day by sharing a bottle of champagne with his barber. It’s a touchstone — a parable on the idea that, though staff can be trained and menus can be developed, there is no substitute for personally “living” hospitality. Something that might be innate can possibly be instilled, but has to be believed in and cultivated every second, in every member of the restaurant crew.”
🍰 Dutch painter Arnout Van Albada
With thanks to Rose Florence whose notes I genuinely look forward to each time I land on the Substack home page, I now covet a painting from Dutch still life painter Arnout Van Albada.
Hot off the November press:
Flesh by David Szalay clinched the 2025 Booker Prize (read my review here).
National Book Awards were bestowed.
NPR released its annual online Books We Love mix-and-match tool.
The New York Public Library has also proclaimed he best books of 2025.
The (Actually Useful) Book Gift Guide: Hands down, the most useful book-focused gift guide, ever, courtesy of Ochuko Akpovbovbo and Martha Adams.
Writers gonna write, unless people doing their taxes and checking their email snag their spot.
👓 Effiel Tower, Aurora Huiza, The Paris Review
🔨 Mother of Men, Lauren Groff, The New Yorker
Three cheers for highly portable paper mags filled with the analog version of YouTube shorts. Many of the lit mags (Granta, I’m looking at you) boast full color photography, poetry, and interviews. Just last night, I disappeared into”Eiffel Towers,” a story set in an eyeglasses shop that brought me straight back to my early New York City days as a young independent adult when a Saturday pre-smartphones meant going for a long meander through whatever neighborhood you pleased without worrying over affiliate links in your selfies. Reminded me of my days shopping at Selima Optique which I was thrilled to discover is still alive and kicking. Also, Lauren Groff has done it again (are we surprised?). Take courage as she grapples with men of all stripes circling her like a pack of turkey vultures ready to stand guard (or will they go in for the kill?).
⏰ On the Calculation of Volume, Book III
You can see my initial review of On the Calculation of Volume I here:
Volume III dropped last Tuesday, just in time for escaping any unsavory relatives during the upcoming holiday season. Also, a reminder that it took Danish author Solvej Balle nearly forty years to complete this seven-volume series, echoing:
“That’s how it was then! Everything that grew took long to grow; and everything that ended took a long time to be forgotten. Everything that existed left behind traces of itself, and the people then lived by their memories, just as we live nowadays by our capacity to forget, quickly, and comprehensively.” — Joseph March, The Radetzky March
🎣 Thomas McGuane Is the Last of His Kind
I am, increasingly, returning to prose that delights in the outdoors, writers who excel at describing a simple meal on the banks of a river, a sunrise in the mountains, the simple noticing of trees. As such, this Atlantic profile of Thomas McGuane hit just right. Firmly fixed in Montana, McGuane is a passionate fisherman who spent years making an annual pilgrimage to Key West, the perfect place for a literary-obsessed angler (he is married to Jimmy Buffett’s sister). McGuane writes cowboy literature of the modern sort, “His cowboys keep their saddles in the back of their sedans.”
✏️ A Battle With My Blood
In this excruciatingly personal essay, Tatiana Schlossberg reveals a terminal leukemia diagnosis, detailing the betrayal of a body that once granted her access to 10-mile Central Park runs, fifty-kilometer cross-country races, and three-mile Hudson River swims. Within, poignant reflections on caregivers, family, and what her cousin’s current actions as the Secretary of Health and Human Services could mean for the future of medical research.
🦞 Last Night At the Lobster
A new-to-me favorite released in 2008 by Stewart O’Nan. O’Nan (notable for his sports book collaborations with Stephen King) is a prolific writer who has an expert’s way with depicting the lives of a skeleton Red Lobster crew on this, the last day before the small-town Connecticut branch is to shutter. It doesn’t take Manny — the threadbare manager caught up in a love triangle with no good answers — long to realize that the day will not go according to plan no matter how fastidious his planning. While a blizzard roars outside, an exhausted cast of characters executes a story of such sweet perfection that you can’t help but applaud this gloriously human novella.
📚 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
In case you missed my review earlier this month, here it is again. A tremendous tale, perfect for a holiday break.
🎧 Hanif Abdurraqib on Album Anniversaries
There’s a lot to love about Hanif Abdurraquib, beyond, of course, his gloriously inventive prose. Abdurraquib is a runner. A son of Columbus, Ohio. A sneaker hound. A sports fan. A music man through and through. An oracle of grief. Anytime I see his name in a byline, all other tasks fall away. In the above, a series written for Longreads, he’s released three dispatches on the following albums:
☕️ Midcoast Villager
Three cheers for the Midcoast Villager, a Camden, Maine-based paper, defiant in the face of those who proclaim the death of local news.
“It has to revolve around community.” Yes, indeed.
I can’t watch it all but I do my best:
Elissa Suh wrote an excellent compare/contrast of the two newest “maternal breakdown” pics, Die My Love and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Down Cemetery Road, Three Goodbyes, and The Beast in Me made it onto my Thanksgiving travel download list. Apple Tree Yard and Towards Zero remain on deck.
Perfect Days and Nouvelle Vague are also queued up for the holiday season as a (hopefully) peaceful foil to all the festive busyness.
Stating this publicly in the hopes that it holds our over-scheduled family to account: forced family fun coming our way with a weekly viewing hour dedicated to the latest from history doc aficionado Ken Burns: The American Revolution.
🚞 Train Dreams
College English gave me the gift of Denis Johnson in the form of Jesus’ Son, a book that despite the more than two decades passed, I still remember by its tight, breathtakingly good storytelling. Last week I listened Train Dreams, a modest audiobook project clocking in at just twenty two minutes over two hours. It did not disappoint. The next logical step was a viewing of the newly dropped film version that seems destined — in a crowd of issue-driven/remixed superhero blockbuster/umpteenth serials — to be an awards season favorite. The story follows Robert Grainier, a young orphan boy turned logger at the turn of the 20th century in the American West. Grainier falls in love with Gladys and in turn lives a life infused with immeasurable heartache and beauty.
✨ Come See Me In the Good Light
Andrea Gibson was a groundbreaking spoken word poet who, while they were on this earth, provided so much light and hope to people through her undimmable creativity and vulnerability. As their partner Megan Falley explained, “Andrea thinks of poetry as “what can I give to people?”” This film documents Andrea’s final year on earth living with cancer.
🤯 Pluribus
I touched on Vince Gilligan’s show a few weeks back but now that I’m four episodes in, I can wholeheartedly recommend. If zombies aren’t your thing, try to stick with it after the first episode. The show’s protagonist Carol is one of a handful of humans untouched by an inexplicable affliction that has most of humanity settling into a pleasing affect not suited to the misanthropic protagonist.
I’m thinking a lot about the undercurrent running strong throughout. What would we give up for surface level peace and harmony? How do our emotions and actions help or harm those around us, even perfect strangers? Where does the center of consciousness reside? What does a service-oriented mindset, even if fueled by the hive, look like in action?
