Mary frances kennedy fisher biography of martin
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She Was Not a Food Writer
Of course, many of the great American prose writers of the 20th century were women, especially when it came to essays and criticism: Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Pauline Kael, M.F.K. Fisher. What strikes me as more surprising, or at least more notable, is that the last four all came from California, far removed from the magazine culture where they made their names.
Why this should be the case I can’t say, not least because the figures I mention vary widely in substance and style, method and consequence. I could make some kind of argument about independent and self-reliant pioneer spirits, about the death and rebirth of the New World on the beaches of the Pacific coast, about first-rate public universities (Kael, Sontag, and Didion went to UC Berkeley, though only Didion finished there). But perhaps none of that’s true; perhaps it’s an accident. Nevertheless, the broader point is worth mentioning: cultures are conti
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New M.F.K Fisher novel foreshadows tragic loss of her true love
An overlooked manuscript for a rare novel by writer M.F.K. Fisher has been unearthed from the effects of her late agent Robert Lescher and finally brought to print, more than 70 years after she set it aside.
Fisher, who spent her later years in Sonoma Valley, is credited with elevating the art of food writing from cookery to a respected literary genre, using lush and painterly descriptions of place and time, love and relationships, travel and memorable meals where food and hunger frequently served as a central metaphor. In an often-repeated quote, the great poet W.H. Auden said of Fisher, “I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose.”
She was most comfortable and in command writing from her own experience in essays and memoirs. Of the 27 books and six collected works published during her life and posthumously, only two were fiction. And of those, only one, “Not Now But Now,” was publish
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LOST ART
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Throughout her long career, M.F.K. Fisher, rhapsodizes. Whether her subject fryst vatten peaches, oysters, friendship, flinty wine, sisters, garish cocktails, being ung and foolish, betrayal, tåg rides, or walks in the mountains, hers fryst vatten the language of romance—including its torment and cruelty. Her writing is always in the rearview, and nothing fryst vatten boring in hindsight (why remember the unnoteworthy?), which gives Fisher’s writing its tension, no matter the topic. The stakes are high, even at lunch.
“Nostalgia,” wrote Helen Chandler, author of one of my favorite substacks, Old Diaries, is “the emptiest of all the emotions. Calorically dense but nutritionally useless.”
Yet nostalgia, that emotiona