The Urban Picnic Being An Idiosyncratic And Lyrically

“The latest fashion among young city-dwellers, providing a new advertising niche for manufacturers of luxury products, is the good old family picnic.”—Le Monde “An upper-class English ritual traditionally confined to rural French life, the picnic has been rebranded.”—The Economist “The great charm of this social device is undoubtedly the freedom it affords. . . . To eat cold chicken and drink iced claret under trees, amid the grass and the flowers.”—Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science, and Art, 1869 Urban picnics are a hot foodie trend right now; from The Economist to Le Monde, food journalists and lovers the world around are jumping on the blanket. Like so many of us, they want to put their hectic city lives on hold and enjoy themselves—without having to head off into the hinterland. The Urban Picnic is designed for modern gourmands and kitchen newcomers alike to inspire them to introduce a little pleasure and picnickery into their lives. With an irreverent and highly opinionated history of the picnic, strange accounts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, original illustrations and over 200 recipes—many contributed from renowned chefs such as Nigella Lawson, Mark Bittman, Regan Daley and Bob Blumer—it’s the essential how-to (and how-not-to) for anyone who was ever looking for a tasty little morsel to eat under that tree that grows in Brooklyn. Two-color throughout. Recipes include: Barbecued Lemon Chicken (Anne Lindsay) Banana-Strawberry Layer Cake (Regan Daley) Mint Julep Peaches (Nigella Lawson) Chicken Liver Crostini (Umberto Menghi) Ahi Tuna Salad with Green Papaya (Rob Feenie)

Picnics are happy occasions and have always been a diversion from every day cares. We think of the picnic as an outdoor meal, set on a blanket, usually in the middle of the day, featuring a hamper filled with tasty morsels and perhaps a bottle of wine, but historically picnics came in many forms, served any time of the day. This first culinary history reveals rustic outdoor dining in its more familiar and unusual forms, the history of the word itself, the cultural context of picnics and who arranged them, and, most important, the gastronomic appeal. Drawing on various media and literature, painting, music, and even sculpture, Walter Levy provides an engaging and enlightening history of the picnic.

Urban picnics are a hot foodie trend right now; from The Economist to Le Monde, food journalists and lovers the world around are jumping on the blanket. Like so many of us, they want to put their hectic city lives on hold and enjoy themselves - without having to head off into the hinterland. The Urban Picnic, whimsically subtitled Being an Idiosyncratic and Lyrically Recollected Account of Menus, Recipes, History, Trivia, and Admonitions on the Subject of Alfresco Dining in Cities Both Large and Small, is designed for modern gourmands and kitchen newcomers alike, to inspire them to introduce a little pleasure and picnickery into their lives. With an irreverent and highly opinionated history of the picnic, strange accounts from the 19th and 20th centuries, original illustrations, and over 200 recipes - many contributed from renowned chefs such as Nigella Lawson, Nadine Abensur, and Mark Bittman - it's the essential how-to (and how-not-to) for anyone who was ever looking for a tasty little morsel to eat under that tree that grows in Brooklyn. Two-colour throughout. Includes more than 100 illustrations. Recipes include:Barbecued Lemon Chicken (Anne Lindsay), Banana-Strawberry Layer Cake (Regan Daley), Mint Julep Peaches (Nigella Lawson), Chicken Liver Crostini (Umberto Menghi), and Ahi Tuna Salad with Green Papaya (Rob Feenie).

The best of short literary memoirs, essays, and reflections, many of which were written expressly for this collection. Also available The late Judith Kitchen, editor of the perennially popular anthologies Short Takes, In Short, and In Brief, was greatly influential in recognizing and establishing flash creative nonfiction as a form in its own right. In Brief Encounters, she and writer/editor/actor Dinah Lenney expand this vibrant field with nearly eighty new selections: shorts—as these sharply focused pieces have come to be known— representing an impressive range of voices, perspectives, sensibilities, and forms. Brief Encounters features the work of the emerging and the established—including Stuart Dybek, Roxanne Gay, Eduardo Galeano, Leslie Jamison, and Julian Barnes—arranged by theme to explore the human condition in ways intimate, idiosyncratic, funny, sad, provocative, lyrical, unflinching. From the rant to the rave, the meditation to the polemic, the confession to the valediction, this collection of shorts—this celebration of true and vivid prose—will enlarge your world.

Most Canadians are city dwellers, a fact often unacknowledged by twentieth-century Canadian films, with their preference for themes of wilderness survival or rural life. Modernist Canadian films tend to support what film scholar Jim Leach calls “the nationalist-realist project,” a documentary style that emphasizes the exoticism and mythos of the land. Over the past several decades, however, the hegemony of Anglo-centrism has been challenged by francophone and First Nations perspectives and the character of cities altered by a continued influx of immigrants and the development of cities as economic and technological centers. No longer primarily defined through the lens of rural nostalgia, Canadian urban identity is instead polyphonic, diverse, constructed through multiple discourses and mediums, an exchange rather than a strict orientation. Taking on the urban as setting and subject, filmmakers are ideally poised to create and reflect multiple versions of a single city. Examining fourteen Canadian films produced from 1989 to 2007, including Denys Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989), Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (1992), Mina Shum’s Double Happiness (1994), Clément Virgo’s Rude (1995), and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007), Film and the City is the first comprehensive study of Canadian film and “urbanity”—the totality of urban culture and life. Drawing on film and urban studies and building upon issues of identity formation in Canadian studies, Melnyk considers how filmmakers, films, and urban audiences experience, represent, and interpret urban spatiality, visuality, and orality. In this way, Film and the City argues that Canadian narrative film of the postmodern period has aided in articulating a new national identity.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A seminal collection from one of the true masters of the short story. Spanning the duration of Cheever’s long and distinguished career, these sixty-one stories chronicle and encapsulate the lives of what has been called “the greatest generation.” From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in “The Enormous Radio” to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Swimmer,” these are tales that have helped define the form. Featuring a preface by the Pulizter Prize-winning author, The Stories of John Cheever brings together some of the finest short stories ever written. "Cheever’s crowning achievement is the ability to be simultaneously generous and cynical, to see that the absurd and the profound can reside in the same moment, and to acknowledge both at the detriment of neither." —The Guardian

Opening a dialogue between the literary and filmic works produced in Central Europe and in the Anglophone world, this volume explores the role of affects and emotions such as shame, fascination and withdrawal in contemporary literature and culture.