Acclaimed "New Yorker" journalist, novelist and poet, Calvin Trillin is also America's funniest and best-loved writer about food. This selection of some of his wittiest articles sees him stalking a peripatetic Chinese chef, campaigning to have the national Thanksgiving dish changed to Spaghetti Carbonara and sampling the legendary Louisiana boudin sausage - to be consumed preferably 'while leaning against a pickup'. Eschewing fancy restaurants in favour of street food and neighbourhood joints, Trillin's writing is a hymn of praise to the Buffalo chicken wing, the deep-fried wonton, the New York bagel and the brilliant, inimitable melting-pot that is US cuisine.

Eating with the Pilgrims and Other Pieces

Calvin Trillin

Penguin Books, Ltd.

When two gas station attendants find what appears to be a Viking runestone while clamming, a (fictional) small Maine town goes agog with Viking enthusiasm. Berryville is set to lay claim to be the site of America's first Nordic colonists, although there are some skeptics, too. A comic novel, including some fine faux country-music lyrics.

Runestruck

Literature & Fiction

Little,Brown

Calvin Trillin has never been a champion of the “continental cuisine” palaces he used to refer to as La Maison de la Casa House—nor of their successors, the trendy spots he calls “sleepy-time restaurants, where everything is served on a bed of something else.” What he treasures is the superb local specialty. And he will go anywhere to find one. As it happens, some of Trillin’s favorite dishes—pimientos de Padrón in northern Spain, for instance, or pan bagnat in Nice or posole in New Mexico—can’t be found anywhere but in their place of origin. Those dishes are on his Register of Frustration and Deprivation. “On gray afternoons, I go over it,” he writes, “like a miser who is both tantalizing and tormenting himself by poring over a list of people who owe him money.” On brighter afternoons, he calls his travel agent. Trillin shares charming and funny tales of managing to have another go at, say, fried marlin in Barbados or the barbecue of his boyhood in Kansas City. Sometimes he returns with yet another listing for his Register—as when he travels to Ecuador for ceviche, only to encounter fanesca, a soup so difficult to make that it “should appear on an absolutely accurate menu as Potage Labor Intensive.” We join the hunt for the authentic fish taco. We tag along on the “boudin blitzkrieg” in the part of Louisiana where people are accustomed to buying boudin and polishing it off in the parking lot or in their cars (“Cajun boudin not only doesn’t get outside the state, it usually doesn’t even get home”). In New York, we follow Trillin as he roams Queens with the sort of people who argue about where to find the finest Albanian burek and as he tries to use a glorious local specialty, the New York bagel, to lure his daughters back from California (“I understand that in some places out there if you buy a dozen wheat-germ bagels you get your choice of a bee-pollen bagel or a ginseng bagel free”). Feeding a Yen is a delightful reminder of why New York magazine called Calvin Trillin “our funniest food writer.”

Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Random House]

Murray Tepper would say that he is an ordinary New Yorker who is simply trying to read the newspaper in peace. But he reads while sitting behind the wheel of his parked car, and his car always seems to be in a particularly desirable parking spot. Not surprisingly, he is regularly interrupted by drivers who want to know if he is going out. Tepper isn’t going out. Why not? His explanations tend to be rather literal—the indisputable fact, for instance, that he has twenty minutes left on the meter. But once New Yorkers become aware of Tepper, some of them begin to suspect that he knows something they don’t. And an ever-increasing number of them are willing to line up for the opportunity to sit in his car with him and find out what it is. Tepper Isn’t Going Out is a wise and witty story of an ordinary man who, perhaps innocently, changes the world around him.

Tepper Isn't Going Out: A Novel

Dramas & Plays

Random House Publishing Group

They Went: The Art and Craft of Travel Writing (The Writer's Craft)

Six renowned travel writers describe the creative process involved in this popular form of narrative, drawing on their own works to reveal how to create a sense of place

IAN FRAZIER

Andrea Lee

Mark Salzman

Vivian Gornick

Tobias Schneebaum

Houghton/Mifflin

About Alice

Memoirs

Uncivil Liberties

What, you may ask, is easygoing, noncommital (except when it comes to food) Calvin Trillin doing at The Nation, that most earnest and austere of political journals? Well, he's not writing political humor--not really; no, he's just having chiefly non-partisan fun in a political neighborhood, and so will readers of these 50 short columns from 1978-81. (Kirkus Review)

History

Americas

Tocknor & Fields

Does the Bush Administration sound any better in rhyme? In this biting array of verse, it at least sounds funnier. Calvin Trillin employs everything from a Gilbert and Sullivan style, for describing George Bush’s rescue in the South Carolina primary by the Christian Right (“I am, when all is said and done, a Robertson Republican”), to a bilingual approach, when commenting on the President’s casual acknowledgment, after months of trying to persuade the nation otherwise, that there was never any evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11: “The Web may say, or maybe Lexis-Nexis / If chutzpa is a word they use in Texas.” Trillin deals not only with George W. Bush but with the people around him—Supreme Commander Karl Rove and Condoleezza (Mushroom Cloud) Rice and Nanny Dick Cheney (“One mystery I’ve tried to disentangle: / Why Cheney’s head is always at an angle . . .”) The armchair warriors Trillin refers to as the Sissy Hawk Brigade are celebrated in such poems as “Richard Perle: Whose Fault Is He?” and “A Sissy Hawk Cheer” (“All-out war is still our druthers— / Fiercely fought, and fought by others.”). Trillin may never be poet laureate—certainly not while George W. Bush is in office—but his wit and his political insight produce what has been called “doggerel for the ages.”

Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Alice Lets Eat

Konecky&Konecky

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Books by Calvin Trillin