Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

Muriel Spark

She walks along the broad street, scanning the windows for the dress she needs, the necessary dress. Her lips are slightly parted; she, whose lips are usually pressed together with the daily disapprovals of the accountants’ office where she has worked continually, except for the months of illness, since she was eighteen, that is to say, for sixteen years and some months. Her lips, when she does not speak or eat, are normally pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet, marked straight with her old-fashioned lipstick, a final and a judging mouth, a precision instrument, a detail-warden of a mouth; she has five girls under her and two men. Over her are two women and five men. Her immediate superior had given her the afternoon off, in kindness, Friday afternoon. ‘You’ve got your packing to do, Lise. Go home, pack and rest.’ She had resisted. ‘I don’t need a rest. I’ve got all this work to finish. Look — all this.’ The superior, a fat small man, looked at her with frightened eyeglasses.

– Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat (New Directions; $8.00)

What’s almost as good as eating food? Reading about it! This collection, now in paperback and in stock, is a fabulous choice for the stop-and-go style reader, and for those of us who would just as happily peruse a cookbook as start a novel. Short pieces that revolve around cooking and dining alone, from great writers, including Ann Patchett, Jonathan Ames, M.F.K. Fischer, Nora Ephron, and Haruki Murakami, among many others.

Most beans are lowly, of course, but it seems to me that the pinto, the lentil, and the black bean are the lowliest of them all, and all the more charming because of it. Sometimes I picture these three beans holding hands and chiming together, ‘We’re lowly! We’re of the earth! We’re beans for the people!’ And sometimes, when I envision this trio, the black-eyed pea waddles into view and says, ‘Whaddabout me, guys?’ And the pinto, the lentil, and the black bean say, ‘Hiya, black-eyed pea! Get in here! We didn’t forget you!’ Then they all sing some kind of bean song.

-Jeremy Jackson, “Beans and Me,” Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (Riverhead, $14)

A few taste-testers from Sloane Crosley’s fabulous essay collection:

I think husbands are like tattoos–you should wait until you come across something you want on your body for the rest of your life instead of just wandering into a tattoo parlor on some idle Sunday and saying, “I feel like I should have one of these suckers by now.  I’ll take a thorny rose and a ‘MOM’ anchor, please.  No, not that one–the big one.” (From “You on a Stick”)

As for other vegetarians, I tell them I started eating sushi because I developed a mercury deficiency.  I had to become a pescetarian to save my life.  This is a total lie.  But it’s a lie that works.  Contrary to popular belief, vegetarians aren’t holistic Nazis.  They will accept medical betrayal.  What they won’t accept is that I got lazy and decided fish were yummy and didn’t have nervous systems complex enough to register pain, and that celebrities like Edward Furlong are freaks for trying to free the lobsters. (From “Lay Like Broccoli”)

-Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There’d Be Cake
IN STOCK (Riverhead Books, $14.00)

[39] The ill-starred poet, rejected by his family, despised by the multitude and starving to death in his garret, was a standard element of Romantic mythology well before Paul Verlaine published his Poetes maudits in 1884.  That Baudelaire was already beginning to work his way into a personal variant of the myth in his early twenties is obvious from his reports of his friends from the Pension Bailly, in the days before his aborted voyage to India, when he constantly harped on the misfortune of his mother’s rejection of him, as revealed by her remarriage.  He was to find stronger claims still.  On his return, although he alleged now he had ‘wisdom in his pockets’, he seems to have been increasingly driven by a sense of rage and revolt against the values embodies by his mother, step-father and half-brother, an anger that found a useful parallel in the political events of a country growing increasingly unwilling to accept the leadership of Louis-Philippe’s bourgeois monarchy.

- Rosemary Lloyd

Charles Baudelaire

(Reaktion Books, $16.95)  In hot pink paperback!