Morris Ernst, second from left, defending Flaubert’s November against obscenity charges in a New York City courtroom, 1935. Copyright: Harry Ransom Center, UT-Austin I hope everyone had a nice 4th, and that any people or pets living within fifty miles of a city are healing from the inevitable shell shock. I especially enjoyed this drone video showing LA's insane amateur pyrotechnics displays, which is more or less what I witnessed in DC. I was already in a celebratory mood he

Photo © Irwin Wong I am delighted to announce the sale of Rice, Water, Earth, by Nancy Matsumoto and Michael Tremblay, to Terri Jadick at Tuttle Publishing. Rice, Water, Earth is a rice-paddy-to-glass journey through one year of sake brewing in Japan. It opens with the authors planting sake-grade rice in a muddy field in Yokawa, Hyogo Prefecture, and closes in an izakaya (traditional Japanese pub) with the authors tasting sake brewed from the very rice they helped plant. In b

I am pleased to announce the sale of Salt Wars, by Michael Jacobson, to Matthew Browne at MIT Press. For nearly four decades, the federal government’s “Dietary Guidelines for Americans”—the country’s basic nutrition policy—has urged people to consume less salt. But sodium consumption has hardly budged and tens of thousands of people die prematurely every year as a result. Salt Wars describes how for decades the food industry, a handful of industry-friendly researchers, and at

Congratulations to Sheela Prakash, whose debut cookbook Mediterranean Every Day sold to Thom O'Hearn at Harvard Common Press! Sheela is a food writer and recipe developer who has been on staff at Epicurious and Food52. Currently she is an editor at Kitchn, the largest independently owned food media site. Sheela is also a registered dietitian and certified wine educator who holds master's degrees from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy and New York University's De

Brickell flooding during Hurricane Irma. MATT MCCLAIN THE WASHINGTON POST In September 2018 I sold my fellow Middlebury alum Mario Ariza's debut book Disposable City to Nation Books (now called Bold Type Books). That book is a deeply personal investigation of the present and future peril of sea level rise and climate warming in the Magic City (a harbinger for coastal cities worldwide). Mario is hardly the only Miamian thinking about the fate of their low-lying coastal city. I