Algonquin Books Blog » Amy Stewart

Algonquin’s Guide to Gift Giving, Winter 2011

admin — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:28:45 +0000

I always wait until the last minute to buy Christmas and Chanukah presents for my family. It’s not because shopping slips my mind, or because I forget about the holidays or my family, but mostly because I never know what to get my family. I generally end up buying them things I would actually like for myself, so they’ll share with me. An Arcade Fire CD for my father, or a chocolate cookbook for my mother, items they’ll enjoy but ultimately pass on to me. We call these gifts “red firetruck presents,” a phrase that evolved from a long-ago Christmas during which my uncle gave his father a toy red firetruck for Christmas, and then claimed it for his own Christmas morning.

If you’re like me, and you still don’t have a clue what you’re giving your family for the holidays this winter, we’ve prepared a gift guide for this winter season. Our choices are tailored to the specific interests of your loved ones, and I’m sure they’ll pass these great books on to you when they’ve finished reading!

For the Sports Enthusiast:

Cardboard Gods by Josh Wilker

Josh Wilker uses his childhood collection of baseball cards to begin each chapter of his nostalgic and heartbreakingly comic memoir. He recounts his experiences growing up in the 1970s–a time marked by Vietnam, Watergate, counterculture, sexual liberation, and stadium rock. Cardboard Gods announces the arrival of a talented new voice in the stadium of big-league memoirs.

For the Music Lover:

Little Blues Book by Brian Robertson

Little Blues Book is a funky celebration of America’s troubadours in the court of hard knocks. With everything from instructions on how to write your own blues song to a chronicle of infamous blues deaths, Little Blues Book has a rhyme, a face, and a word of advice for just about everything life has to offer.

Rock On: An Office Power Ballad by Dan Kennedy

Dan Kennedy is expecting a glamorous career in the show industry, complete with catered meals aboard a private jet, when he’s hired by a major record label in 2002. Instead, he finds himself eyeball-deep in mass layoffs, artist contract cuts, and all-time-low sales while in a workplace that embodies both This Is Spinal Tap and The Office. Kennedy’s absurdly hilarious and oddly heartbreaking account of his time in the trenches of the music industry is sure to entertain your favorite music fan.

For the Cocktail Lover/Literature Lover:

Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers by Mark Bailey

“What’s the use of winning the Nobel Prize if it doesn’t even get you into speakeasies?” Sinclair Lewis’ quote begins his section of this entertaining homage to American writing. Bailey’s profiles of forty-three great American writers include a favorite cocktail, true stories of their saucy escapades, and intoxicating excerpts from their literary works. We recommend purchasing two copies–one for the bedside table and one for the bar.

For the Child at Heart/Literature Lover:

What the Dormouse Said: Lessons for Grown-Ups from Children’s Books by Amy Gash

What the Dormouse Said is a compilation of quotes drawn from both classic and lesser-known kid’s books. The book is organized into helpful sections like “Goodness” and “Eating Habits” so you can have a quote handy for every occasion. The collection ranges from the touching (“An egg, because it contains life, is the most perfect thing there is. It is beautiful and mysterious”) to the humorous (“This sharing business is for the birds”) and will entertain a reader at any age.

For theFoodie:

52 Loaves by William Alexander

After the success of The $64 Tomato, Alexander set out on a quest to produce a perfect loaf of bread. Alexander’s journey takes him through the back alleys of Morocco, a monastery in Normandy, the famed École Ritz Escoffier in Paris, the New York State Fair, and his own backyard. An original take on the six-thousand-year-old staple of life, 52 Loaves explores the nature of obsession, the futility of trying to re-create something perfect, and the mysterious instinct that makes every person on the planet, regardless of culture or society, respond to the aroma of baking bread.

Seasoned in the South: Recipes from Crook’s Corner and from Home by Bill Smith

A favorite restaurant of many in Chapel Hill, Crook’s Corner has received national acclaim from The New York Times, Bon Appétit, Travel & Leisure, and The Washington Post since it first opened its doors in 1982. Bill Smith, the chef at Crook’s Corner for over a decade, serves up a variety of recipes from his own collection. Readers can now try to recreate the classic, up-scale Southern dishes they enjoy at Crook’s Corner from their own kitchens.

Maman’s Homesick Pie: A Persian Heart in an American Kitchen by Donia Bijan

Award-winning chef Donia Bijan begins her memoir with her childhood in the midst of the Iranian Revolution of the 1970s, as her family is forced to flee their home in Tehran. She continues her story with memories of her teenage years in America, her studies at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, and her life as a successful chef in San Francisco. Sprinkled throughout her book, Bijan shares recipes that blend her life experiences: Ratatouille with Black Olives and Fried Bread, Purple Plum Skillet Tart, Roast Duck Legs with Dates and Warm Lentil Salad, and twenty-seven other delicious dishes.

Man With a Pan: Culinary Adventures of Fathers Who Cook for Their Families by John Donohue

My dad is an excellent chef, and while I didn’t grow up like Mario Batali’s kids did, feasting on monkfish liver and foie gras, I went to bed with a full stomach and a happy heart every night. My dad would likely find community within this collection of twenty-one essays by esteemed writers and chefs including Batali, Peter Kaminsky, Mark Bittman, Stephen King, and Jim Harrison. This entertaining collection features more than sixty recipes, some mouth-watering, others titled “A Pretty Good Cake” or “Whole Roast Cow.”

For the Naturalist:

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

With beautiful detail, Bailey recounts her experiences with a Neohelix albolabris– a common woodland snail. Sick and bedridden, Bailey observes a wild snail living on her nightstand and begins to explore the meaning of her own confined place in the world. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating examines not only human existence, but any kind of life, with grace and wit.

Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects by Amy Stewart

Following her award winning Wicked Plants, Stewart profiles over one hundred of our worst insect enemies. From the world’s most painful hornet to millipedes that stop traffic, from “bookworms” that devour libraries to Japanese beetles that munch on roses, Wicked Bugs will have even your toughest cousin waking up from nightmares of six- and eight-legged creatures.

The Music of Wild Birds: An Illustrated, Annotated, and Opinionated Guide to Fifty Birds and Their Songs by Judy Pelikan

My mom’s best friend is an avid birder with a whole windowed room in her house dedicated to bird-watching. I can only differentiate between birds by taste: chicken, turkey, duck, etc. The Music of Wild Birds remarkably appeals to both the novice and experienced birder alike. Pelikan takes her readers inside the world of bird music. Learn how to identify a bid by its song–and then how to sing back to it by following musical scores.

For the Fashionista:

Love, Loss, and What I Wore by Ilene Beckerman

In her New York Times bestselling memoir, Ilene Beckerman uses her changing wardrobe to tell the story of her life in Manhattan during the 1940′s and ’50′s. She navigates marriage, divorce, and motherhood with good humor and fabulous clothes. This pithy book is packed with brightly colored illustrations and fashion-inspired anecdotes–some of them comical, and some of them poignant. Love, Loss, and What I Wore is a celebration of love, life, and womanhood.

For the Gardener:

Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart

When I was in middle school, I watered a neighbor’s plants over winter break while they vacationed. They paid me with a gift certificate to a local music store, which I used to purchase The Backstreet Boys’ “Millennium” album. Had they given me this book instead, I might have developed a greater awe and appreciation for botany. Stewart, who tends a poison garden of her own, takes on a tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war in a book that is sure to inform and entertain.

French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France by Richard Goodman

Few would have the courage to pack up and move from New York to a small village (small = population of 211) in France for a year, but Goodman did. He begins to work as hired hand in his neighbors’ fields in an effort to make friends, and this sparks within him a yearning for his own plot of land. French Dirt details the love story between a man and his garden, as well as the growing friendship between an American outsider and a close-knit community of French farmers.

A Rose by Any Name: The Little-Known Lore and Deep-Rooted History of Rose Names by Douglas Brenner & Stephen Scanniello

A poetry professor once instructed me never to write about flowers. He clearly never read A Rose by Any Name. Encompassing art, literature, science, technology, history, and everything in between, the stories behind rose varieties include enough curiosities, romance, tragedy, wit, mystery, scandal, and earthy delights to satisfy even the most nit-picky of critics.

For the Armchair Traveler:

Very Charleston: A Celebration of History, Culture, and Lowcountry Charm by Diana Hollingsworth Gessler

Gessler’s guide and illustrations are every bit as charming as the city of Charleston itself. From winding cobblestone streets and lush gardens to schooners and sailboats, no page in this book disappoints. Each of Gessler’s wonderful watercolors is accompanied by fascinating facts about Charleston.

Wicked Bugs: Amy Stewart in the BBC Gardening Blog

admin — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:17:58 +0000

I generally don’t consider a bug that eats a plant to be wicked. Plants are, after all, the food supply for many insects; I’m hardly going to blame them for eating their dinner. No, a wicked bug is one that has caused catastrophic, widespread suffering, or inflicted pain and disease and misery on us. Mowing down the lettuce or boring into the melon vines is nothing in comparison to the assassin bug that bit Charles Darwin, the giant centipede that terrorized a Londoner, or the Brazilian wandering spider that bit a pub chef.

And yes, I’m using the term “bug” loosely to refer not just to insects, but to a variety of creepy, crawling, and slithering creatures that infest not just our gardens, but our nightmares as well.

So for the most part, I’m at peace with my bug-ridden garden. But even ordinary garden pests can be terrifying in their own way. Consider the following:

To read the rest of this piece, click here to proceed to the BBC blog.

Drunken Botany 101

admin — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:46:50 +0000

A few months ago, the Algonquin team received a rather innocuous looking box in the mail. Because we receive dozens of boxes each day, we weren’t too excited…until we opened it up and discovered a treasure trove of mini bottles!

So among the many reasons why we love author Amy Stewart (Wicked Plants, Wicked Bugs) now is the delightful fact that she sends us liquor as a thank you gift.

Amy recently signed up her newest book with Algonquin, The Drunken Botanist. As she said in the accompanying note:

I undertake the excruciating tasks of visiting distilleries, mixing drinks, deciding which obscure citrus trees to plant in my cocktail garden, and interviewing bartenders and botanists. It’s excruciating work, this one.

I’m sure you all know how grateful I am that you’ve stuck with me this far. But in case, I do feel the need to

send you presents from time to time. So here are some interesting plants for you, in liquid form: Juniperus communis, Lavendula angustifolia, Citrus aurantium var. myrtifolia (which I’m growing in my garden), Sambucus nigra, Punica granatum, Vitis vinifera, and, of course, Zea mays. Oh, and there’s even a little Agave tequilana in there, but you’ll never guess which bottle it’s in.

You can actually make a very nice botanical cocktail by mixing two parts gin to one part Campari and one part St-Germain (shaken, with a squeeze of lemon); and any mediocre sparkling wine can be upgraded with a splash of either st-Germain or Pama. (I trust you North Carolinians know what to do with the moonshine.)

So in Amy’s honor, this past Friday the Algonquin staff opened up those mini bottles and made a few cocktails with Amy’s recipes. Here are a few photos from our late Friday afternoon party at Algonquin.

– Kelly Bowen, Publicity Manager

On Writing: Amy Stewart and Paul Collins

admin — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:54:57 +0000

Amy Stewart and Paul Collins talk belles-lettres, the art of nonfiction, e-publishing, colonial mixed drinks, and cramming for your own interviews. Amy Stewart is the acclaimed author of Wicked Plants, Wicked Bugs, Flower Confidential, and the forthcoming The Drunken Botanist. Paul Collins is the author of The Murder of the Century, The Book of William, Sixpence House, and Not Even Wrong.

AS: Paul, I’ve always admired the way your work seems to defy categorization. You’ve written about autism, rare books, Thomas Paine, and now there’s the new book, about a grizzly 19th century murder–not to mention the Paul Collins Library with McSweeneys, which I love so very much. It seems like it must be so liberating to approach your work in this way–very much as a classic “man of letters.” How has that been for you?

PC: Today is literally the day of publication for The Murder of the Century! I literally do not know what subjects I’ll be writing about from one year to the next, which is probably why no two of my books get filed in the same part of a bookstore. It’s freeing and it’s confusing as hell! There’s a very reasonable desire — by booksellers, by media bookers, by reviewers — that you can tell someone what you do in a single sentence. And I can’t, though NPR’s “Literary Detective” peg comes in surprisingly handy. But it’s really a freelancer ethic. Freelancers are where one still finds belles-lettrists writing about anything that captures their curiosity; there’s that sense of if you sell an editor on it, then hey, you can write it. That’s allowed me to take on more scholarly pursuits, like 18th-century autism or a missing 1920s author, with a journalistic approach of parachuting in and doing intensive location work and primary sourcing — or sometimes running the other way, and hitting a journalistic piece with this insane scholarly overkill.

Really, I’m lucky that I live in an era after New Journalism encouraged using a first-person presence to (sort of, barely) hold it all together into a recognizable body of work. But that roving interest and reportorial presence has a much deeper lineage in the kind of writing you do — there’s that older tradition of the naturalist’s field notes. When did you find yourself being drawn into that personal approach to writing on worms or flowers — or into moving into that whole other ancient tradition of herbals and bestiaries on Wicked Plants and Wicked Bugs?

AS: Congrats on your pub date! Don’t you always expect flowers or strolling violinists in the front yard or something? Pub dates are so weirdly anticlimactic.

Anyway–you know, it’s funny. I like to say that I write about what interests me, but it’s always within this loose category of natural history, science, botany, etc., which is certainly not ALL that interests me. The first three books were all written in the first person, so I was very much present in the story as the narrator, and I was truly sharing my own opinions and insights as I went. With the Wicked books, I was writing in third person, but with a voice–there’s still a narrator, even in the third person. I wanted the voice to have this dry, mildly alarmed, conspiratorial, darkly comical feel. It’s a tricky thing to figure out in the third person, but as you know, those medieval herbals did themselves have a voice–they were all crackpots and liars and snake oil salesmen themselves.

Hey, so I just heard David Shields talking about his book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. He was talking about how thin the line is between fiction and nonfiction, and he said (in a much more clever way than I will say it here) that it is a mistake to view nonfiction as being about a subject–that just as with fiction, it’s about the art of prose. The language. It’s literature.

I could have kissed him. People always ask me what I’m trying to accomplish with my writing–like, am I trying to get people to plant a garden or use less pesticides or buy local or avoid getting poisoned, or what? And what I really want to say is, “I don’t want people to do anything, other than enjoy the book. What I’m trying to do is to make art. To make literature.” I mean, the subject is a kind of frame to hang the art on, but all I want to do is string words together in a beautiful way.

I think of it like this: Imagine a painter who does oil paintings of old, beat-up trucks. All the painter wants to talk about is light and color and brushwork, but what if people only wanted to talk about carburetors and gas mileage?

Do you deal with that? Do you find that people just want to talk to you about the subject (Shakespeare, autism, etc) and do you feel that the writing itself gets overlooked, or just not remarked upon?

PC: Oh, absolutely. I smile and nod, basically, because if they don’t get what I’m doing as an artist, then … they don’t get it. Writing about Shakespeare’s First Folio is a good example of that, especially because there are people who can talk and talk about the literal subject. But for me, discussing the plays of Shakespeare … I mean, he’s great, but I have nothing new to add there. My interest in the folio was as a totemic object. The objects themselves — Tom Paine’s skull, Shakespeare’s book, an 1897 murder — they’re all macguffins. I just like watching what they set in motion. Actually, I’m thinking that’s the section of the bookstore I want to make for my books: Macguffins.

And after I’m done with the book, I’m kind of done with the subject … I’ve lived it and breathed it for years at that point. The one exception, I guess, is writing about autism. The immediacy of that subject never changes for me, so I’ve a closeness to Not Even Wrong at both the artistic and the literal level. That’s the one subject where I will keep talking nuts and bolts with readers, because it’s a very nuts and bolts part of my life.

Part of it, too, is that the publishing process is so slow, which I guess is another reason why publication day’s often this weird anticlimax. By the time a book comes out, I’m halfway into my next project … I have to sit down and read it to remember what the hell I wrote. I’ll be at the Starbucks across the street from some radio station, sitting there an hour before an interview, cramming from my own book! Because it’s been at least 5 months since I looked at a galley, and probably 9 to 12 months since I’ve given the subject any real thought. This odd alienation from the work sets in — there’s not the immediacy of, say, writing a piece for Slate and seeing it go up the same week or even the same day.

You’ve actually had that more immediate kind of experience, I’m guessing, with the ebook-only The Last Bookstore in America — I haven’t even worked up the nerve yet to do a Kindle Single or something like Byliner or Atavist — how’s the experience of venturing into e-territory changed your view of working in print? Is it something you’ll do again?

AS: I can’t believe you confessed to cramming for your own interviews! I thought I was the only one who had to do that. It is a very weird situation to find yourself in. If you were to ask me about the book I’m working on right now, today, I could talk for hours (and I do, boring my dinner guests to death.) But that book I was researching a couple years ago that has only just now landed in stores? Yeah, it takes some work to get back to that one.

I did write a novel that is available only on the Kindle (and coming soon to all the other ebook platforms). Even that wasn’t an immediate experience–I wrote the book, edited it quite a bit, passed it around to some readers, including a freelance editor, sat on it, thought about it, let time pass–and finally Kindle-ized it almost a year later. I did feel weird about it. I definitely feel like I needed a publisher to tell me, “Yes, this book is working, here’s what you need to do to get it ready to publish, and then we will launch it into the world.” It seemed very strange to put it out into the world without going through that process.

But you know what? I’m a painter, and I have a lot of friends who are professional artists. And they wake up in the morning, go to their studio, paint a painting, and decide for themselves if it’s good enough to sell. Of course, a gallery owner can act like a publisher–they can be the intermediary that says, “Paint another landscape. We can sell your 18 x 24 landscapes all day long. These portraits of chickens? Not so much.” But most of the painters I know sell their work directly to people and send very little of it to a gallery. They have a blog and sell small paintings online, or they have a show in their own studio, or they hang their work in a coffee shop or something like that. So that’s what I really do like about releasing a book directly through these digital platforms. I like it that I can act like a painter and say, “This is where I want to go next as an artist, and I’m going to go there on my own, and I’ll put it out there and see how people respond to it.”

But of course, the other thing that was so amazing about Last Bookstore was that it was fiction. The fact that I could just make stuff up was just astonishing. You know how sometimes real life is boring? So you write yourself into a corner and realize that you’ve got to find a way to make this next boring bit interesting because it can’t be cut out entirely? With the novel, I would find myself thinking, “Huh. He’s back at his hotel room, and–I’m bored. I can’t think of a single interesting thing to make him do next.” So I’d do what I always do with nonfiction–pace around the room and get frustrated and eat junk food — and then I’d think, “Wait! He’s not in his hotel room! He’s–on a hot air balloon!” That was so insanely liberating.

What about you? Ever write any fiction? Or do you ever long to just take those interesting stories in history you write about and stretch them just past the truth into fiction, for the sake of the story?

PC: I’m a lapsed novelist! I owe my ability at narrative to having spent my teens and twenties writing novels. One of the best things I ever did, when I was 25, was write a couple of terrible screenplays … They went straight into the drawer, but they absolutely forced me to think in scenes and learn how to dialogue. There’s nothing else to hide behind when you’re writing a script.

But I’m a bit of a literalist in nonfiction. I like writing stuff that sounds stretched, but turns out not to be. Though I’ll entertain suppositions to bring a scene alive … Right now I’m writing a scene in 1799 NYC where I know that a couple went to church, and I know which night they went — from newspaper reports afterward I know how much money was collected ($138), what Psalm was preached upon — and from meteorology records I know the moon was nearly full and that it had snowed several times in the preceding week. So I feel fine about taking those facts and setting it in scene, by having the two of them sitting in the pew and seeing the collection plate passed around, having the bishop saying that particular Psalm as a line of dialogue, and them seeing their breaths in the moonlight as they walk home, their boots crunching in the snow … All guesses on my part, strictly speaking, but I think they’re justifiable ones.

It’s something that’s really shaped my last couple of books, because I can just download scans of every newspaper published that week, gather journal entries and published accounts — and then shatter it all into individual facts and assemble them into a novelistic kind of mosaic. It’s a set of tools that’s allowing me to create something I couldn’t have readily made 3 or 4 books back, and it’s really the direction my work’s now moving in. Which brings me to that old question: where’s your work now moving? What are you working on next?

AS: I’ve been driven to drink. I’m writing a book called The Drunken Botanist that is a botanical exploration of the cocktail world. All the plants we ferment, distill, infuse, blend, muddle, juice, squeeze, and crush in the name of intoxication. At this very moment I’m trying to think of a drink to dedicate to Frank Meyer, a plant explorer for the USDA (who knew the USDA had plant explorers?) who introduced his namesake lemon, along with 2,500 plants (!), to the US through his trips through Asia, Russia, and Europe. He died in 1918 at the age of 43 while sailing down the Yangtze River to Shanghai–apparently he went overboard “under mysterious circumstances.” You can imagine how excited I am to learn more about those mysterious circumstances–no phrase excites a writer more.

And somehow I will relate all this back to drinking.

Speaking of which–cheers! I believe you need a drink named after you. Some variation of a Tom Collins called a Paul Collins? Tell me your taste in booze and I’ll get to work on that.

PC: Ok, first of all: that book is going to have the most awesome readings ever. And this furthers my contention that the world needs combination bar-bookshops

I’ve actually become fascinated by colonial drinks, because the next thing I’m working on is set around a murder case that both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr got involved with — and the first thing that struck me was that the water in Manhattan was so bad back then that you needed to stiffen the drinks. As far as I can tell, basically every 18th century drink recipe is: take something and add rum.

So I’m going to say: a Paul Collins has rum in place of the gin, plus a slice of lime. (Because, you know, scurvy and all.) A few of those, and you’ll be partying like it’s 1799.

Mother’s Day Roundup

admin — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:05:34 +0000

My mother lives by the motto “There’s no such thing as too many books.” You can usually find her nose-deep in a battered paperback, sitting in our dog Chester’s favorite armchair, which he has graciously allowed her to use in exchange for a belly rub. Now that I’m in college, I’ve hijacked her philosophy as a convenient excuse for my double-stacked dorm room bookshelves and the multiple E. M. Forster novels hiding somewhere in my bed. Thanks, Mom.

As Mother’s Day rolls around again, I suggest you all get her what she really wants: books, books, and more books! Here are eight Mother’s Day picks:

– Jordan Castelloe, Blog Intern

1. Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs by Heather Lende

Heather Lende’s new memoir is a meditation on mothers, daughters, community, and faith. After a near-fatal accident, Lende has to depend on her family ties and the tight-knit community of Haines, Alaska, for support and compassion. The title comes from her mother’s last words of advice to the author. Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs is a magnificent book informed by Lende’s gift for illuminating the ordinary.

2. Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

“My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist.” So begins this resonant new novel by Tayari Jones, which centers around James Witherspoon’s two families–one public, and one private–and his two teenage daughters who meet and forge an unlikely friendship. A tale of love, secrets, and betrayal unfolds against the backdrop of 1980′s suburban Atlanta, and at the heart of it all are two girls struggling to imagine themselves as women–just not as their mothers.

3. Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt

How well do we know the people we love? In Caroline Leavitt’s new novel Pictures of You, a fatal car crash raises questions about love, loss, redemption and forgiveness. Two women running away from their marriages collide on a foggy stretch of highway. Only one of them survives. Haunted by guilt, Isabelle finds herself drawn to the grief-stricken husband and son that the other woman left behind.

4. Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart

Amy Stewart’s Wicked Plants is the perfect gift for your favorite gardener or botanist or, in my mother’s case, armchair gardener. My mom’s been talking about planting an herb garden for eleven years running. If anything, I think this book might defer the herb garden indefinitely. Amy Stewart’s A-Z compendium of ill-behaved plants (a leaf that triggered a war! a vine that strangles! a shrub that paralyzes!) is so much fun to read that my mother might never get around to planting that parsley.

5. Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger by Lee Smith

Lee Smith is renowned for her resilient women characters, and Mrs. Darcy is no exception–these stories are peopled with wives and mothers, young and old, English teachers and truck-stop waitresses, who refuse to let the world keep them down. Her characters are ordinary folks, but her nuanced style and tightly-plotted stories bring out the extraordinary in all of us.

6. Love, Loss, and What I Wore by Ilene Beckerman

7. The Woman I Kept to Myself by Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez’s new collection of poems centers around her personal experience. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New York, she explores cultural crosscurrents with eloquence and wit. Her poems show a journey towards self-discovery–of finding, through writing, the woman she kept to herself. Julia Alvarez take on personal subjects like love, death, marriage, divorce, and faith, and turns them into universal discoveries to which every woman can relate.

8. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow

Heidi Durrow’s bestselling novel won the Bellwether Prize for fiction for its searing depiction of a biracial girl’s coming-of-age in 1980′s America. Rachel is born of a Danish woman and a black G.I. A terrible accident on a Chicago rooftop forces her to move in with her African-American grandmother and, for the first time, confront challenges of race and identity in a strictly black-and-white world. As she struggles to find a place for herself, Rachel must also unravel the mystery of her mother’s tragic accident.

Amy Stewart: “A funny thing has happened with Wicked Plants”

admin — Thu, 05 May 2011 13:35:32 +0000

A funny thing has happened with Wicked Plants. It’s turned into a road show. A carnival of sorts. Social networking, nineteenth-century style.

A year before Wicked Plants was released, I was hanging out at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with director Scot Medbury, and I launched into a rant about what I thought botanic gardens ought to do to engage the public.

“You should tell stories!” I said. “This place is so much more that pretty scenery. These plants have a history. A backstory. They have secrets. Some of these plants have been used to commit crimes! They’ve started wars! They tell the story of colonialism, of piracy, of— ”

Well. You get the idea. Off I went. And the next thing I knew, Scot and I were cooking up an idea for an exhibit based on Wicked Plants that did just that—told stories. Human stories. Stories of how we, as a people, have interacted with plants, for better or for worse, throughout our long, checkered history.

What started at Brooklyn Botanic Garden has continued, in one form or another, around the country. The Boerner Botanical Gardens in Milwaukee created a themed plant walk based on Wicked Plants. The Tucson Botanical Gardens just held a winter-long exhibit based on the book, and they even created a fictional character, Dr. Ergot Ratbane, who led visitors through his mad plant laboratory.

Dr. Ergot Ratbane

And now the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers has opened a summer-long exhibit called Wicked Plants: Botanical Rogues & Assassins. They’ve created this crazy, over-the-top concept for the exhibit: at one end of the gallery, you peer through the windows of a Victorian house and see a man slumped over his wine glass, dead. His wife, the poisoner, is running away. You are in her backyard, where she has been tending a garden of poisonous plants to help her carry out her crimes.

Creepy! Weird! Fabulous! Honestly, as much as I love Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and all that, what I really love is this: People lining up to get a look at the real-life characters the book is based on. Bringing their friends. Asking questions. Telling stories. It’s a circus, and I love that. Some people dream about their book getting made into a movie, but I dream about it getting made into a traveling cabinet of wonders.

And guess what? That’s exactly what’s happening. The North Carolina Arboretum has been building a national traveling exhibit based on Wicked Plants that’s going to hit the road in 2012.

And Wicked Bugs? Looks like there will be some bug carnival action, too. A Wicked Bugs portable exhibit is in the works now.

Meanwhile, I can’t wait to get back to the Conservatory to see how their wicked plants are doing. In the two days I was there, I saw vines creeping up the pipes along the ceiling and flowers coming into bloom. It’s just going to get more lurid and verdant as the weeks go by. I’ll be back at the Conservatory on June 1 and again on October 6, and horticultural mystery writer Rosemary Harris will be there on May 4. Hope to see you there!

–Amy Stewart, author

Publication Day: Wicked Bugs

admin — Tue, 03 May 2011 14:14:49 +0000

Amy Stewart, author of the New York Times bestsellers Wicked Plants and Flower Confidential, is back with her newest book, Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army and Other Diabolical Insects. (Be sure to see the hilarious trailer for the book at bottom, where you’ll also find an excerpt.) And, as is typical with Stewart’s books, there’s been a wealth of national media attention, including a New York Times interview; a Fresh Air interview; and an NPR Weekend Edition interview.

Wicked Bugs is a darkly comical look at the sinister side of our relationship with the natural world. Stewart details over one hundred of our worst entomological foes–insects that infest, infect, and generally wreak havoc on human affairs. With wit, style, and exacting research, she has uncovered the most terrifying and titillating stories of bugs gone wild. It’s an A to Z of insect enemies, interspersed with sections that explore bugs with kinky sex lives (“She’s Just Not That Into You”), creatures lurking in the cupboard (“Fear No Weevil”), insects eating your tomatoes (“Gardener’s Dirty Dozen”), and phobias that feed our (sometimes) irrational responses to bugs (“Have No Fear”). Intricate and strangely beautiful etchings and drawings by Briony Morrow-Cribbs capture diabolical bugs of all shapes and sizes in this mixture of history, science, murder, and intrigue that begins—but doesn’t end—in your own backyard.

To celebrate, we’re giving away three copies of the book and three cute, cuddly stuffed bookworms, courtesy of Giant Microbes. Just leave a comment detailing your worst bug encounter–you can post it here on our blog or on our Facebook page and you’ll automatically be entered.

Want to purchase an autographed/personally inscribed book for yourself or a friend? Visit Stewart’s website for details. It would make a great Mother’s Day present, don’t you think?

Watch the book trailer:

Read an Excerpt:
Excerpt from Wicked Bugs

From Amy Stewart: “Annie Proulx, Garden Writer”

admin — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 15:44:51 +0000

We know ANNIE PROULX as the straight-shooting author of POSTCARDS, THE SHIPPING NEWS, and OPEN RANGE (which includes the masterpiece “Brokeback Mountain”). If you haven’t read her work, you must. She has a way with language that makes your bones shake, like standing too close to a bass amp. In this blog post from Algonquin’s favorite garden-and-bugs-genius, AMY STEWART takes us back to Proulx’s days as a garden writer–the Proulx I didn’t know existed.

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Before Annie Proulx became Annie Proulx, she was a garden writer. She wrote a book about salad gardening and another, called The Gourmet Gardener, about kitchen gardening. She wrote about growing grapes and building walkways and making your own food from dairy products. She wrote what is still the definitive guide to making hard cider. Storey and Rodale were her publishers; Storey has kept three of her titles in print, in part because they are still useful books, and in part, I suspect, because they get a kick out of sending royalty checks to Annie Proulx.

I don’t know much about her personal life–she’s one of those fairly reclusive authors who manages to stay offline and get work done. I can tell you that she lived in Vermont, worked a variety of jobs, got married and divorced a few times, and that, from the age of about 45 to 52, she wrote ten books and booklets on gardening and homesteading.

Then, the year after the publication of The Gourmet Gardener, her collection of short stories Heartsongs and Other Stories was published. That was followed by a novel, Postcards, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award. And in 1993–at the age of 58–came The Shipping News, and with it a Pulitzer and a National Book Award.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Proulx has this to say about her years as a garden writer:

“What interested me at this time was the back-to-the-land movement — communes, gardening, architecture, the difficulty of maintaining a long, dirt-road driveway. Not only could I solve some of those problems in real life … I could write about them and make some money…. But gradually this kind of thing became more and more boring, and my interests changed. I began to move towards fiction for intellectual stimulation.”

And:

“What’s reflected in my fiction did not so much jump from manuals on grape growing and fence mending as from very serious academic hours in libraries and archives and an inborn curiosity about life.”
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I’ve become fascinated with this remarkable transformation in her life that came about in her late 50s. I already had a copy of her book on cider. With the publication of her new memoir, and all the press surrounding it, I got to wondering if she had published any other books back in her cider-making days. It took a little while to compile the list–there are 10 in all, I think, and I’m missing one in the above photo– but once I had the list, it was easy enough to pick up each of these for a few bucks online. They aren’t exactly collectors’ items. (The complete list is after the jump if you’re interested.)

I’ve shown these books to a few friends — all women, although I’m not sure that men wouldn’t have the same response – and every one of them has lit up. “This gives me hope,” said one friend in her late fifties. “Look at what I can still do.” “Oh, yes,” another said. “I’m sort of banking on the fact that my most productive years are ahead of me.”

There is something hopeful and wonderful in the notion that you could go from writing books on fencebuilding to–well, being Annie Proulx. But there’s something weird about it, too. It’s so strange to see her name on these old gardening books. have a recurring publication dream before every book comes out–I’ve already had it for Wicked Bugs–in which the first box of books arrives, fresh from the printer, and it turns out to be a completely different book than I thought it would be. A different title, a strange cover, chapters inside that I don’t remember writing on subjects I don’t know or care anything about. I imagine Annie Proulx having a dream that she wrote a novel called The Shipping News, but when it arrives from the publisher, she opens it and finds a box of pamphlets called Making Your Own Insulated Window Shutters.

You might be wondering if these straightforward guides to gardening and homesteading give any hint that the author would go on to win every major literary award and be regarded as one of America’s greatest novelists. I’ll let you decide. Here are a few random bits of garden writing from Annie Proulx:

On cider: “If you make cider with apples that haven’t been washed, that have dirt, manure, grass, and other vegetative matter clinging to them, if your crusher and press are filthy with dust and old pomace, if your bottles and barrels are dirty and encrusted with ancient deposits, if a mouse or rat falls into your fermentation vat, if you add rotten apples or worse to the juice, if you forget to mill the fruit for six weeks after the harvest is in, if you simply do not care enough about the process to keep your equipment clean, you are destined to produce a disgusting and vile liquid that is the result of putrification, not fermentation. The problem is 100 percent avoidable.”

On bartering: “Try to list only skills you enjoy exercising; it’s not much fun swapping bookkeeping chores for the things you need if you loathe ledgers and moved to the country to escape from them. If you prefer knitting fancy, intricate patterns instead of plain socks and mufflers, say so. If making an outrageously luxurious Black Forest cake appeals to you more than canning tomatoes, stick with the cake.”

On salad greens: “What lettuces there are! Frilled edges, curly leaves, speckled and freckled, ruffled and folded, shaped like oak leaves and deers’ tongues, growing in tall cones or low rosettes, and in colors from lime green, deep viridian and bronze to ruby, creamy yellow, or variegated combinations such as a delicate green leaf with a dark red border; lettuces with textures that range from a crunchy, crisp snap to a tender, melting smoothness; flavors from the tasty, savory cos to the delicate, buttery Bibbs.”

And–just to prove that there is nothing new under the sun–she wrote this 24 years ago on the subject of kitchen gardening: “A new kind of gardening has become part of our lives. It is experimental, specialized, nostalgic, and beautiful when edible plants are part of the aesthetic landscape. The new gardening parallels our awakened interest in fine food, regional delicacies, and native cooking–hot chiles handed down from generation to generation in the Southwest, New England deep dish apple pie made with Pinkham Pie apples or greenings. We have developed a taste for the choice and unusual products of the garden.”

Well. There it is, folks. If Annie Proulx, Garden Writer had been doing her thing in 2011 instead of 1981, she might have been right here, hanging out with us. Imagine that.

- Amy Stewart, From her blog DIRT, posted on February 7, 2011

Annie Proulx’s garden bibliography, as near as I can tell:

Proulx, A., & Nichols, L. (1980). Sweet & hard cider: Making it, using it, & enjoying it. Charlotte, Vt: Garden Way Pub.

Proulx, A. (1980). Great grapes: Grow the best ever. Pownal, Vt: Storey Communications.

Proulx, A. (1980). Making the best apple cider. Charlotte, Vt: Garden Way.

Proulx, A. (1981). “What’ll you take for it?”: Back to barter. Charlotte, Vt: Garden Way Pub.

Proulx, A. (1981). Make your own insulated window shutters. Charlotte, Vt: Garden Way.

Proulx, A., & Nichols, L. (1982). The complete dairy foods cookbook: How to make everything from cheese to custard in your own kitchen. Emmaus, Pa: Rodale Press.

Proulx, A. (1983). The gardener’s journal and record book. Emmaus, Pa: Rodale Press.

Proulx, A. (1983). Plan and make your own fences & gates, walkways, walls & drives. Emmaus, Pa: Rodale Press.

Proulx, A. (1985). The fine art of salad gardening. Emmaus, Pa: Rodale Press.

Proulx, A. (1987). The gourmet gardener: Growing choice fruits and vegetables with spectacular results. New York: Fawcett Columbine.

A Valentine’s Horror Story

admin — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 15:19:09 +0000

When I was writing Flower Confidential, I was always looking for romantic Valentine’s Day stories on flowers that I could include in a short chapter on our most romantic holiday. But florists have a dark side of their own; they wanted to tell me horror stories instead.

A florist in Seattle told me about the time that a man came in and said that he would like to place a standing order to have flowers sent to his wife every Friday. Florist loves standing orders because it means that they can order their highly perishable product with confidence, knowing that they have already sold it to a customer. It’s easy money.

But that wasn’t all the man wanted. He also wanted a bouquet sent to his girlfriend every Friday.

“We knew we shouldn’t have agreed to send flowers to the girlfriend,” the florist told me. “The first rule of adultery is this: use a different florist for every woman. But we just couldn’t resist the standing order. The money was too good. So we agreed to do it.”

For the first year, everything was fine. A bouquet went to the wife and another went to girlfriend. The florist was happy to have such a steady customer.

But then, Valentine’s Day came. And you can imagine how chaotic it is in a flower shop on Valentine’s Day. That’s when the unthinkable happened: the names on the cards got mixed up.

“We sent the wife’s card to the girlfriend, and the girlfriend’s card to the wife,” the florist said. “We got three very angry phone calls that day, and we lost them all as customers.”

Don’t let this happen to you. Using a different florist for every sweetheart is a good idea, but an even better idea is to settle down with your one true love and keep those flowers coming.

To avoid other Valentine’s Day calamities, just remember:

1. The goal of every florist is to run out of flowers on Valentine’s Day. Don’t wait until the last minute to order, because there might be nothing left but yellow carnations. And don’t even think about making up for it with a bouquet on February 15. As one person in the industry told me, “If it’s February 15, go buy her a diamond bracelet. You’re too late for flowers.”

2. Don’t look cheap. Valentine’s Day is not the time to cut corners, especially if you just went out and bought yourself a new iPad after Christmas. If you’re really on a tight budget, pick the flowers up yourself to avoid delivery charges, and ask for a simple wrapped bouquet of tulips or lilies, without fillers and without a vase. They’re gorgeous, romantic, and elegant.

3. Exposing your flowers to subfreezing temperatures will kill them just as quickly as placing them in the path of a blasting furnace. Make sure they are completely wrapped up if you take them outside, and try to find a cool place for them inside away from the fireplace and heating vents. Flowers that wilt quickly might be viewed as a metaphor for your rapidly fading affections, and you don’t want that.

4. Match the flowers to the situation. Gerbera daisies, with their hip, pop art sensibility, are perfect for a new relationship and they don’t scream “impending marriage proposal.” If you’ve been sending flowers to your sweetheart for a decade or more, it’s time to mix it up with a potted orchid that says “I know how to keep things interesting” and “You, like these orchids, are a timeless beauty.”

5. If your loved one buys fair trade coffee and organic apples, don’t send a bouquet that raises questions about worker rights and chemical exposure. Such issues have ruined many a romantic evening. Ask for flowers that have been certified through the VeriFlora eco-label program, or check a retailer like Whole Foods, which carries Fair Trade-certified flowers.

–Amy Stewart, author of Flower Confidential

Win This: Wicked Plants Seed Collection

admin — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:49:43 +0000

As some of you know, I planted a poison garden while I was working on Wicked Plants. I’d never grown, much less seen, some of the plants in the book, and it’s just too weird to write about plants you don’t know. So I managed to come up with about 35 species that I could actually grow in my climate, in a small secluded garden, without inflicting too much harm on anyone (poison oak, for instance, was not invited).

And you know what? Some of those plants were very pretty. Castor bean! Datura! Opium poppy! Foxglove! Tobacco! Lovely, really. Not suitable as an entree, but lovely nonetheless.

So imagine my excitement when Botanical Interests offered to put those very plants together in a Wicked Plants seed collection. The impetus for this is the upcoming Wicked Plants exhibit at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers (more about that in the coming months)–this gives them a little something extra to sell in the gift shop and support their fine work.

(Botanical Interests, by the way, does a lot to support the fine work of botanical gardens. Have you seen their Botanic Garden Series in partnership with Denver Botanic Gardens?)

So. Here, just in time for your last-minute holiday shopping: the Wicked Plants Seed Collection. Here’s what you get: Datura meteloides, foxglove ‘Gloxiniiflora’ blend, Nicotiana sylvestris, two poppies (Double Peony and Hungarian Blue), and a castor bean ‘Impala’.

Oh, and let me just add–I’m not making money off this; I was just happy to see it happen so that the Conservatory would have a revenue-generator for their gift shop next year. If Botanical Interests does well with it, all the better. And if you happen to know a shop that would like to carry the collection, have them contact Botanical Interests and make it so.

–Amy Stewart, author of Wicked Plants

Want to win the Wicked Plants book and the Wicked Plants Seed Collection? Just leave a comment here or on our Facebook page to enter!