“The really good ideas are generated in the process of writing, and only if you're working at white heat. You don't get those ideas if you're worrying about the commas.”

“I meant my first novel to be an epic which would contain, in an artistic narrative, ‘everything I knew.’”

“Kafka’s characters are often hungry.”

The Cannibal Princess Cake tasted of orange blossoms and cherries instead of human flesh, but we made-believe.

“My favorite element of the meal was the subtle geranium cream with blackberries.”

“I should have known that all the Modernist women bought Hellmann’s.”

“They eat different kinds of sweets, they take marijuana, they demand jalebis along with their snacks.”

“Kōno’s heroines are willing to transgress everything ... to take something for themselves: maybe it’s self-definition, or simply pleasure.”

“The food in the novel reflected a transitional time in American cuisine, when cooking from cans was still respectable but the from-scratch movement was in its embryonic stages.”

“Since I was doing penance for my sins, I dutifully shaved acorns in my free time for about a week.”

“My finished tartlets were dry, but better than those more faithful to the rhyme.”

Dovlatov partakes of the feast without comment: to take from the system that was taking from you was only fair.

Whip up a satirical murder menu from the first feminist detective novel.

The dish arrives buoyed by boat metaphors, drawing a parallel between Mrs. Ramsay’s quest to serve dinner and her husband’s to sail to the lighthouse.

Cook a frontier-food Thanksgiving with John Ehle.

Cook a Frankenstein-inspired Halloween feast of foraged-fare acorn scones, a Corpse Reviver cocktail, and a bread pudding.

Cook an October feast of agua de lima and scary soup to pair with Amparo Dávila’s tales of domestic horror.

The Romanian specialties of a circus-performing mother who slaughtered chickens in the hotel bathtub for dinner

Valerie Stivers draws up a menu inspired by Mikhail Sholokhov’s ‘And Quiet Flows the Don.’

In honor of C. L. R. James and his only novel, ‘Minty Alley,’ Valerie Stivers bakes meat, guava-jam, and aloo pies.

In honor of Sigrid Undset’s epic of medieval Norway, Valerie Stivers cooks up barley bread, beef stew, and gingerbread cookies.

To honor the author of ‘Moby-Dick,’ Valerie Stivers chases her own white whale: the perfect chowder.

With the help of a friend, Valerie Stivers cooks ika daikon, nabe-pot stew, and chestnut-and-millet dumplings inspired by the work of Kenji Miyazawa.

Valerie Stivers dines in the fashion of Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano, whose instincts as a detective are nearly as strong as his appetite.

Valerie Stivers makes a salad, red rice, French bread, oysters with mignonette, and a crown roast of pork inspired by the books of James Baldwin.

Just in time for Halloween, Valerie Stivers summons a meal inspired by the transgressive French writer Gabrielle Wittkop.

Valerie Stivers tries her hand at making Taiwanese food: hand-pulled egg noodles, thick pork soup, bubble-tea cream puffs, and more.

Valerie Stivers performs what might be her most daring stunt yet: baking a series of five pies inspired by the work of Italo Calvino.

Valerie Stivers makes bread, pork chops, and a simple summer pie as a tribute to literature’s most notorious outcast.

As a tribute to the Haight-Ashbury poet, activist, and domestic icon Steve Abbott, Valerie Stivers devises two recipes for tuna casserole.

To celebrate the fourteenth-century plague epic ‘The Decameron,’ Valerie Stivers cooks up a five-course, all-chicken tasting menu.

Valerie Stivers rises to the challenge of baking Russian rye bread, which appears in nearly all of Varlam Shalamov’s short stories.

As Pavese once said, if you live in Piedmont, you “have the place in your bones like the wine and polenta.”

Hilst’s books are filled with odd uses of food: blouses smelling of apples, penises like “wise and mighty catfish,” and beans as testicles.

Howard’s sprawling Cazalet Chronicles depicts the triumphs, tragedies, and tastes of the twentieth-century English upper class.

I arrived in Glasgow to meet Alasdair Gray with a tape recorder and a list of questions, determined to keep to myself the belief that he should love me.

To celebrate Thanksgiving, Valerie Stivers cooks up a delicious but fittingly scarce meal from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books.

Valerie Stivers cooks up a menu inspired by Shirley Jackson, including dandelion pie, peanut brittle, and deathly sweet blackberries.

Valerie Stivers dreams up a meal fit for a Sicilian prince, including delicious minestrone, a big drum of pasta, and CBD oil–infused granita.

To cook from the stories of the fabulous Bruno Schulz, you’ll need pitted cherries, yeast, and a Dungeness crab.

“How was the church food of your youth?” and other questions for Amber Scorah on her new memoir about leaving the Jehovah's Witnesses.

In honor of Ntozake Shange, Valerie Stivers cooks fried okra, couscous royale, vegan chocolate torte, and “Catfish / The Way Albert Liked It.”

This month, Valerie Stivers’s kitchen time machine transports us back to ancient Rome, when poets like Martial and Catullus ate ridiculous feasts.

From Anzia Yezierska’s chronicles of life on the Jewish Lower East Side, Valerie Stivers draws recipes for latkes, apple strudel, and kugel.

Tomato salad, classic cassoulet, and cherry clafouti with the child-of-nature star of the belle epoque literary scene.

Valerie Stivers takes to the high seas with recipes inspired by the Aubrey-Maturin series.

Valerie Stivers cooks from Iris Murdoch’s Booker Prize–winning ‘The Sea, the Sea,’ a novel full of eccentric food and cooking instructions.

To honor Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s particular mixture of comfort read and Russian tragedy, Valerie Stivers makes futuristic cozy food.

Nescio, the pen name of J. H. F. Grönloh, is Latin for “I don’t know,” but Valerie Stivers knows exactly how to drum up recipes for his ‘Amsterdam Stories.’

Valerie Stivers’s menu for the Imago Trilogy includes guava crumble, cassava porridge, and breadfruit stuffed with salt cod and apples.

To toast Bohumil Hrabal’s absurdist masterpiece, Valerie Stivers cooks Czech goulash, veal medallions, and potato croquettes.

Valerie Stivers cooks with James Salter the only way she knows how: by throwing a plated five-course dinner party for fourteen people, complete with wine pairings and gourmet meat loaf.

Against the odds, Valerie Stivers finds a way to make an appetizing dessert inspired by ‘The Story of the Eye.’

Valerie Stivers salutes Richard Brautigan with watermelon, trout, and more watermelon.

  The writer David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) didn’t really eat food. When I met him, in 1996, when I was twenty-three years old, I really couldn’t cook, though it wouldn’t have occurred to me to consider this something we had in common. W…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.  I’m in Vermont for the summer, living in the town of Winhall, where Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973), an American famous for novels about C…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.       The Nigerian expatriate writer Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017) in her own words was a “sort of” successful novelist in th…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.    Surrealism today is mostly a chapter in art history, so it’s difficult to appreciate the wildness and power it once had, or to imagin…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.      I’ve been reading the Iliad recently, the world’s first war classic, concurrently with Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam, wh…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.      The 1940s wartime Shanghai in Love in a Fallen City, a book of short stories by Eileen Chang (1920–1995), is a bitter and gl…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.     “An Onion” is one of the most famous chapter headings in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and refers not to Russian cuisine…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The Bengali novel Pather Panchali, Song of the Road is best known in the West as a Satyajit Ray film but the 1929s classic is also one of…

In her Eat Your Words series, Valerie Stivers cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.       It’s finally the season for the farmers market, which inspired me to dig out my copy of The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola (1840…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.     The writer Angela Carter (1940–1992) had many guises as a novelist, fairy-tale writer, and feminist theorist but was always o…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.      If the lavish feasts and epic drinking sessions of The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), are any indication,…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.      Langston Hughes’s 1931 classic Not Without Laughter, recently rereleased as a Penguin Classic, tells the coming-of-age story …

  As a not-quite-heterosexual high-school girl, I considered the grand science-fiction gender experiment in The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), one of my formative love stories. The book was published in 1969 and won…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.    The West has a long-held obsession with the roles of women in Muslim societies. The Cairo Trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006),…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.    The first and most deliciously weird collection of European fairy tales comes not from the Brothers Grimm but from Giambattista Bas…

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.    In her diaries, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) liked to boast about her “damn good” lemon-meringue pie, which she was able to produ…

This is the sixth installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column.   My winding path as a reader has led me to a personal specialty in Nigerian literature. I know about the country’s civil war from 1967 to 1970, its languages and e…

This is the fifth installment of Valerie Stivers's Eat Your Words column.    The decline of the continental European aristocracy just before World War I doesn’t sound like a promising period for food … until you read Sybille Bedford (1911…

This is the fourth installment of Valerie Stivers's Eat Your Words column.  In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the 1937 novel on black Southern womanhood by Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), people eat soda crackers with cheese, drink lemonade or sw…

This is the third installment of Valerie Stivers's Eat Your Words column. In my alternative literary universe, people who wish to read romances would be given one option only: Barbara Pym (1913–1980), an English writer whose dry, hilarious, un…

Whipping up recipes from a fictional 1930’s creek picnic.   Ivan Doig’s characters take their food seriously. Doig (1939–2015), a canonical writer of the American West, was shaped by the effects of the Great Depression. His family wer…

This is the first installment of Valerie Stivers's Eat Your Words column.  In St. Petersburg, Russia in the 1830s, peasant style was fashionable, literature was becoming more democratic, and, somewhat weirdly, the poet of human baseness, Nikol…

Translators of the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai are a daring few, but they tend to win awards. This year’s Best Translated Book Award went to Ottilie Mulzet for the first English translation of Seiobo There Below, a dazzling, far-ranging nov…

Sergei Dovlatov, one of the great writers of the Soviet samizdat period, immigrated to New York City in 1978 and published his bone-dry, deeply thoughtful stories in The New Yorker all through the 1980s, until his tragic early death in 1990. Even in …