Provence, 1970

I'm excited by this teaser for my friend Luke Barr's forthcoming book! (Book link here; launch next Tuesday in Brooklyn.)

I read a lot of M. F. K. Fisher in high school, it was the kind of thing I plucked off the shelves of the very good library associated with the school I went to (I wrote about it here - hmmm, that's interesting, I now see that bit as being part of the genesis of the style book). I think regularly of what is justly one of the most famous passages in all of her writing, where she describes the perfect meal - not, as one might expect, a gourmet feast of many courses and subtle delicacies, but a picnic of bread and chocolate consumed on a hillside outside what I believe might have been Marseilles (very characteristic of my memory that the bread and chocolate would have lodged there more thoroughly than the geographical location).