Erik Bledsoe, Book Reviewer

Book Review

The Open-Hearth Cookbook

by Erik Bledsoe

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in early American cooking, fueled, ironically, by advances in technology. Online digital projects such as Feeding America at Michigan State University have made it possible for... Read More

Book Review

Checkered Flag Cooking

by Erik Bledsoe

Deep-fried Twinkies. Yes, deep-fried Twinkies. That’s just one of the more, um, exotic recipes that can be found in this book. While ostensibly a cookbook, this ring-bound volume is actually a celebration of the culture that has... Read More

Book Review

Artistic License

by Erik Bledsoe

This book belongs to an earlier generation of literary criticism, one that is too often undervalued today. The author takes as her intellectual foundation that “writers’ lives are not always particularly interesting; knowledge of... Read More

Book Review

F. Scott Fitzgerald

by Erik Bledsoe

When a biographer (or, in this case, biographers) undertakes to write the life of a person who is already the subject of previous works, it is usually either the result of a discovery of a new cache of documents, or because the... Read More

Book Review

Melville's

by Erik Bledsoe

Readers whose only exposure to Herman Melville was an assigned reading of Moby Dick in college may be surprised to learn that Melville also wrote poetry. Almost certainly, some of those same readers wish that their professor had assigned... Read More

Book Review

Good-bye My Fancy

by Erik Bledsoe

In the introduction, Whitman scholar Robert MacIssac describes this book as “a dialogue of truth.” Less metaphorically, it is a three-part, two-person dramatization. The author is a poet and editor who founded the literary magazine,... Read More

Book Review

New Stories from the South

by Erik Bledsoe

A common witticism proclaims that every Southern work of fiction has to contain a dead mule. There are no dead mules in this year’s collection of Southern stories, but there is a picture of a mule on the cover, which may be a joke on... Read More

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