The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, and Eating while Reading

This is a Featured Preorder* for a book that will be published October 24, 2023.

Here is what the publisher tells us about The Upstairs Delicatessen: 

From one of the lead book critics for the NY Times, an infectiously readable about the pleasures of reading while eating. It's part memoir, part book of quotations, part food writing. A great gift book for the holidays!

• He writes about his youth in West Virginia and Naples, Florida, and his life as a writer and a father through his memories and stories, from attending a exclusive fifty course tasting menu to his father's peanut butter and pickle sandwich, but also through the words of the writers who populate his mind. We get to know him through the words AND the food most dear to him.
• Garner has been book critic for The New York Times since 2008 and was previously the senior editor of The New York Times Book Review. It is hard to find a more well-connected or well-known critic and writer.
• He has read nearly every book you can find about food, reading, and cooking (and most other subjects you can name). Not only that, but his wife is a chef from a food family, and he has spent his life enthusiastically eating.

Garner gathers a literary chorus to capture the joys of reading and eating in this comic, personal classic.

Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for me, gone together. The book you’re holding is a product of these combined gluttonies.

Dwight Garner, the beloved New York Times critic and author of Garner’s Quotations, serves up the intertwined pleasures of books and food. The product of a lifetime of obsessively reading, eating, and every combination therein, The Upstairs Delicatessen is a charming, emotional memoir, one that only Garner could write. In it, he records the voices of great writers and the stories from his life that fill his mind as he moves through the sections of the day and this book: breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking, and dinner.

Through his lifetime obsession with these twin joys, we meet the man behind the pages and the plates, and a portrait of Garner’s life, eager and insatiable, emerges. He writes with tenderness and humor about his mayonnaise-laden childhood in West Virginia and Naples, Florida (including his father’s famous peanut butter and pickle sandwich), his mind-opening marriage to a chef from a foodie family (“Cree grew up taking frog’s legs to school in her lunch box”), and the words and dishes closest to his heart. This is a book to be savored, though it may just whet your appetite for more.

Hardcover.