The drinks menu is easy—anything from scotch on the rocks to wine to martinis to Mint Juleps. And we know what brand mad men and women smoke, at least for now—Lucky Strike. But what do mad men and women eat? When they dine out in season four, it’s Chicken Kiev. And when they’re staying in—well, it’s easy to see why they don’t eat in very often.
In the first episode of the new season, Dan’s housekeeper told him that she had made pork chops—surely enough to drive a man not only to drink but to thoughts of an earlier season, when Betty, jumping up from the table to fetch his dinner, perkily asked, “Hot or cold”? Did we ever see Betty eat, even when she was pregnant? Most evenings she was brooding at the kitchen table, nursing a glass of wine. As little Bobby says, “Mommy doesn’t eat.” I can recall only two noteworthy exceptions: the vision of Betty—in the same episode as Bobby’s observation—devouring a chicken leg after her one-night stand with a stranger and her tryst in a sweet shop over a dish of ice cream with future- second-husband and Freudian-father-figure Henry Francis.
This is a true story. Today as I walked into my office I was immediately confronted.
We thought it would be really fun to do a summer reading piece and asked some of our contributors what they’ve read this summer and what they recommend.
). It’s an extraordinary, textured look at an American family, multi-generations of women and how they influenced their children and generations to come. Written in pitch-perfect prose, it’s just great!
by Willliam Makepeace Thackery but don’t take this very seriously because I read “Vanity Fair” every summer and never manage to get through it... Except that Becky Sharp is one of the great characters ever written – it always loses me (or I lose the book) somewhere along the way... I know my friends at the 
I’m also riveted by Stuart Firestein’s new book 
The rhythm of everyday life enters in: George chops tomatoes at their country house in Weston, and roasted chicken and dessert orange jelly are served to guests. Tanny, in the novel, mentions the kitchen as “the site of continual commotion…it looked forlorn to me tidy.”In The Ballet Cookbook, published in 1966, she collected the recipes of almost every famous dancer or choreographer of the time, including Jerry Robbins, Suzanne Farrell, Margot Fonteyn, and Rudy Nureyev, whose winter borscht is one of the crowd-pleasers. The cookbook has a cult following and, a la Julie and Julia, “Dinner with Mr. B.” events and the like have sprung up, with participants fording the shrimp bisque, blinis, banana sweets, and fish dinners that melted off the frames of the supremely lithe. The Master’s Muse comforts the reader with the assurance that a love of life can fortify a love affair that refuses to perish.
My favorite book this summer is Maria Semple's 
The book that stole my heart and soul this summer was 
(Amy's too shy to mention this but the paperback version of her latest book 
by Patti Smith. Loved. - Christina Wayne
which is stunning. Now reading, 
, a real eye opener. And finished 
, on which I am ambivalent. - Linda Deutsch
, a first novel by G. Willow Willows. Really interesting mix of modern Cairo and mystical jinns. I couldn't put it down. - Allison Thomas
by Marilynne Robinson. I wept at the end just for extraordinary ordinariness of it all. - Pam Felcher
- short stories by Peter Stamm - an internationally-acclaimed Swiss author - stories of people who are lonely and unhappy in their everyday lives (characters with whom we can identify). - Christina Zawadiwsky
and both other Gillian Flynn books - 
and 
. - Kate Guinzburg
by Coburn Hawk. And yes, Maria Semple's Where'd You Go Bernadette is next on my list. - Roni Keller
Yesterday, my favorite author died. He was not exactly plucked in the flower of youth, being 91 and all. He also hadn’t published anything since shortly after my third birthday. Well, he didn’t ever publish a whole lot of anything, at least not anything I could easily get my hands on. He wrote three books, a collection of short stories, and a novella which appeared in “The New Yorker,” but which I have never found in buyable form. I have been trying really hard not to read anything being written about him right now, not blog posts, not opinion pieces, not even obituaries, because this is a private thing for me. I need a little time to think my own thoughts before I open myself up to a flood of writing about how Catcher in the Rye wasn’t really that great, how Salinger was not really very nice to his wives or his children, or how he was (pick one) overrated, underrated, wrong to become a recluse, right to become a recluse, etc. ad nauseum.
“With all that great food in Italy, how do you guys stay so thin?”