The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

Dwight Garner combines his professional life as a literary critic with his personal obsession for food, mapping the intersection where high culture meets the kitchen table. He details specific daily rituals involving gin, oily sardines, and the precise construction of sandwiches, while simultaneously cataloging the meals found in the works of writers like Cheever and Updike. The book organizes these observations into a loose chronological habitus, tracing the sensory experience of consumption from morning coffee through midnight snacks, arguing that reading and eating are two parts of the same physical appetite.

This book is written for lifelong readers who find as much satisfaction in a well-described feast as they do in the meal itself. It appeals to people who treat their libraries and larders with equal reverence. Readers walk away with a vast list of literary recommendations and a renewed permission to indulge in solitary pleasures. It serves as a validation of the gluttonous intellect, providing a specific framework for living a life where the sustenance of the body and the stimulation of the mind are never separated.