The Food Essay fall sessions begin on Tuesday, September 15 and run through October 13. You can choose between 11 a.m. or 7 p.m. EST. Join us for five weeks of reading, talking, and breaking down the many ways of writing about food.
There are two more Desk Salons coming up in 2026: On Sunday, September 20 at 2 p.m. EST, we’ll be in conversation with the wonderful Kate Zambreno about their latest book, Foam, as well as the rest of their brilliant work.
On Sunday, October 11, at 2 p.m. EST, we’ll be treated to a conversation on science memoir featuring Entangled States author Karmela Padavic-Callaghan and Spawning Season author Joseph Osmundson, moderated by Raechel Ann Jolie (author of Rust Belt Femme and the forthcoming The New Sex Wars: Sexual Liberation Against Authoritarianism).
The Salons and the Book Club meetings are free for Desk paid subscribers; non-members can join the Salons for $5. Browse the full Salon archive.
And now, the reason we’re here: We’re going to be entering the fourth year of the Desk Book Club, which launched in 2024. In 2027, I’ll be pulling back on the selections and going quarterly so that more people can hopefully find the time to read and join our discussions. This year, we’re partnering with Philadelphia’s wonderful culinary bookstore Binding Agents. They’ve put together a bundle of the books so that you can get them all at once, if you like.
The Book Club, unlike the Salons, is 100% food focused but of course, we’re bending and expanding what that could mean. We’ve read and will read more fiction; we get into memoir that subverts the genre of “food memoir”; and we look at classic and contemporary food studies. We’ve read brand-new books and others from the ’70s and ’80s. In 2027, here’s the plan:
WINTER: Meatless Days by Sara Suleri Goodyear is a memoir of postcolonial Pakistan that came out in 1989; the title is “a reference to the Pakistani government’s decision in 1947 to designate Tuesdays and Wednesdays as meatless days in order to conserve the national supply of goats and cattle.” We’ll look at how this functions as a motif in her slim, extremely beautiful book.
SPRING: Of Morsels and Marvels by Maryse Condé, from Guadeloupe, will be our first translated nonfiction book. She’s best known as a major novelist. I haven’t yet had a chance to read this but came across it and figured it’d be a nice one for us to get into together. The book follows Condé’s travels around the world, focusing on taste and culinary history. Very much my shit.
SUMMER: The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo has long been a potential Book Club contender, and now its time has come. Through the stories of 26 fruits, Lebo writes about baking, foraging, politics, and more, weaving the personal with the botanical.
FALL: Family Meal by Bryan Washington, a novelist lauded for his ability to write food, will be a perfect way to end the year. It looks at how our relationships to food shift with location, partnership, and everything else that makes up and disrupts a life.
We will figure out the dates for conversations at a later time. I wanted to give folks to rundown as we head into fall and perhaps entice people into our casually intellectual conversations where all are welcome.
We will have a conversation about Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad on Tuesday, October 27, 11 a.m. EST and Lagusta Yearwood’s Sweet + Salty on Tuesday, December 1, 11 a.m. EST. Catch up on the Book Club archive.