Description: More than a collection of vignettes and stories from garden, grill, and kitchen, The Culinary Plagiarist is a sustained adventure in gustatory delight, an intensely private but candid account of desire and all its objects. Opinionated on the full range of human experience, from fasting to inebriety, from sports to politics, from religion to raunch, it is at once serious, humorous, ironic, reflective, grateful, allusive, and appetitive. Along the way it offers a defense of small-scale, local life, of family, of place, and of "the bread we do not live alone by." And also the drinks. Don't forget the drinks. This is a book for people who enjoy being alive, whether in the kitchen, the pasture, the library, the barn, the trout stream, the henhouse (or the doghouse), or the bedroom.
Brief description: Jason Peters is Dorothy J. Parkander Professor in Literature at Augustana College (IL). He is the editor of both Wendell Berry: Life and Work (University Press of Kentucky, 2007) and Land! The Case for an Agrarian Economy, by John Crowe Ransom (a Front Porch Republic book published by the University Press of Notre Dame, 2017).