It struck me that instead, it would be more constructive if I were to list the ways in which food affects politics and decision-making.
Historically, a luckenbooth was a place from which to trade, a lock-up booth on the Edinburgh Royal Mile; or often, by metonymy, the traditional heart-shaped brooch you might buy from one, to pin to the clothes of your firstborn and ward off evil. But whatever the word meant a hundred years ago, Luckenbooth the book is about now. Fagan’s booth of stories – her Cornell box of frenzies, tragedies and delights – offers the present moment in the endless war between love and capital. It’s brilliant.
The surface familiarity surely helped Audrain land a massive advance for the book, which is “Good Morning America’s” book-club selection this month. But what makes it stand out from the rest is Audrain’s nuanced understanding of how women’s voices are discounted, how a thousand little slights can curdle a solid marriage and — in defiance of maternal taboos — how mothers really feel, sometimes, toward difficult children.
Hooked and On Not Being Someone Else point toward the rewards of thinking about literature as bound up with our lives, not cut off from them. Dispensing with the pose of critical aloofness, both Felski and Miller urge literary scholars to reflect on why we care about works of art as much as we do.
Hidden in the lawn at my foot: a black walnut, halved,
a vomer bone nestled in skull, heart-shaped & snout-
like. Insides reveal holes—empty sockets with eyes