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Emily Dickinson was the first poet I actively read. I was in high school, and had stumbled upon a collection of her poetry in the discard pile at the library. I didn’t know anything about her writing; I just knew that she was important and so I took her book home. As unfamiliar as I was with poetry, reading her was a study in intuition—I didn’t know how or why the poems worked, or what the dashes meant, but I didn’t care. The poems seemed so simply composed but so full of meaning I found myself hovering over one or two of them for hours trying to figure out how they worked.

I recently went back and reread her work, and stumbled across this great poem. Just savor the opening line:

1128.

These are the Nights that Beetles love–

From Eminence remote

Drives ponderous perpendicular

His figure intimate

The terror of the Children

The merriment of men

Depositing his Thunder

He hoists abroad again–

A Bomb upon the Ceiling

Is an improving thing–

It keeps the nerves progressive

Conjecture flourishing–

Too dear the Summer Evening

Without discreet alarm–

Supplied by Entomology

With its remaining charm–

Emily Dickinson has captured the American imagination with her mystery. Trying to figure out how she spent her time and what she read and who inspired her has become a riddle. The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts is full of pithy facts about her life; if you can’t get out there to visit it, their website is fun to explore. Learn a little bit more about America’s Sweetheart Poet.

Here are some cookbooks whose insides are easy to navigate and clear, but that challenge you creatively. To me, many of the rules for choosing a good bedside novel also apply to cookbooks: don’t judge all of them by their covers – read the first page in order to tell if it will be a good fit for you, and only buy a book you will use. Of these four books, everyone with a little kitchen motivation could find a great fit.

Mr. Wilkinson’s Vegetables: A Cookbook to Celebrate the Garden by Matt Wilkinson, $27.50, Black Dog & Leventhal

This brand new gem is a good read for people who both grow in containers and are seasoned gardeners. Matt Wilkinson writes about both gardening and cooking  in an approachable way, and the book is filled with pictures and has a very hip design. It is organized by 26 vegetables that are common in American gardens, including tomatoes, leaves from the garden, and fennel.  Following a unique, pagelong introduction to each vegetable are recipes that incorporate it, tips, and explanations about technique. It’s a youthful book, and doesn’t presume much of anything about the kitchen that it ends up in.

Nigellissima: Easy Italian-Inspired Recipes by Nigella Lawson, $35.00, Clarkson Potter

Nigella is the famed author of the cookbook How to be a Domestic Goddess, and is a force in the cooking world. Just look at her website, nigella.com. Her new book covers the gamut of Italian recipes, all of which seem intoxicatingly rich and are paired with beautiful photographs. Each recipe has very clear, ordered instructions. This book is a graceful combination of the gorgeous gift cookbook and a methodical introduction to rich Italian recipes.

The Improvisational Cook by Sally Schneider, $27.50, William Morrow

This one has been around since 2006, but still seems unique in its approach. Combining recipes with explanations of how they work and examples of how they can be improvised upon, this is a book for someone who seriously wants to learn to cook off the cookbook. It is less a cookbook than a class in cooking.  It includes glossaries on pantry essentials and how to create various ethnic flavors.

Home-Cooked Comforts: Oven Bakes, Casseroles, and Other One-Pot Dishes by Laura Washburn, $24.95, Ryland, Peters & Small

This is the best book of one-pot dishes I’ve come across in my time bumbling around the cookbook section. Tons of delicious meat, poultry, fish, and vegetarian recipes, and good photos paired with each.

by Whitney

Alain Badiou is a french philosopher and professor at European Graduate School. He is a Marxist and has been called a contemporary Plato.

His latest book, In Praise of Love <a series of interviews conducted by Nicolas Truong w/Badiou>, is at heart a cleverly formed argument against online dating (OLD) agencies – that OLD is deleting love. This book is a quick read and very approachable (a welcome consolation in the irritating circuit of philosophy).

“We must re-invent love but also quite simply defend it, because it faces threats from all sides.”  It is in reaction to posters for an European internet dating-site, Meetic (the particular), and a collective mutation/transfiguration of modern love-action/language-representation (the general), that he takes up his sword-pen against and strikes. The slogans: “Get love without chance!” and “Be in love without falling in love!” and “Get Perfect love without suffering!” Badiou parses out the constituents of love and risk, he says, is a major ingredient. Love cannot exist truly without the randomness involved. It’s like cracking an egg but finding it full of water rather than yolk and substance.

He argues that the language of these dating companies is deceitful and parallels it to modern American wartime propaganda such as “smart” bombs and “zero dead” wars. Such terms are deceitful because there is risk and there will be deaths. This type of language conditions us to be cold and calculating.

“If you have been well trained for love, following the canons of modern safety, you won’t find it difficult to dispatch the other person if they do not suit. If he suffers, that’s his problem, right? He’s not a part of modernity. In the same way that “zero deaths” apply only to the Western military. The bombs they drop kill a lot of people who are to blame for living underneath. But these casualties are Afghans, Palestinians… They don’t belong to modernity either. Safety-first love, like everything governed by the norm of sayfety, implies the absence of risks for people who have a good insurance policy, a good army, a good police force, a good psychological take on personal hedonism, and all risks for those on the opposite side.”

The risk is not for you, the consumer of this love-commodity, who can easily discard the perfect compatibility, no surprises here, sameness-as-you match and move on to the next Prada-mini-tote-of-a-person drummed out of an algorithm computed by photo likes of possible lovers and the answers to an intimate questionnaire. The “zero death” war is true only when you can forget about the other side of the equation, and today the commodity most desirable is ignorance, which will decay the fabric of any truly good thing. To be able to forget, to not experience the reality of the situation, is what is being tailored for us, and as Badiou suggests, love is at risk to this bourgeois virus, which can be restated as _everything good is at risk.

“You must have noticed how we are always being told that things are being dealt with ‘for your comfort and safety’, from potholes in pavements to police patrols in the metro. Love confronts two enemies, essentially: safety guaranteed by an insurance policy and the comfort zone limited by regulated pleasures.”

If this is the age of ‘convenience is king’, we must be very vigilant, because while our heads are turned and while we take our ignorance pills and sleep very very well, horrors will happen. Love is the killer of this fetishized ego-centrism, and I think Badiou is right.

The first time I read Karen Russell, I didn’t really understand what I was reading. Were stories allowed to be told this way? Magical and surreal, but still so heavily grounded in reality that the reader couldn’t help but feel the gravity of the character’s predicaments? Karen Russell’s highly anticipated new collection of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove has gotten favorable reviews in The New York Times. In fact, the only bad reviews have been that the stories are good, but Karen Russell could do better.

The stories are diverse in their strangeness, always bordering on hilarity, but almost too serious to be funny. In the title story, a vampire struggles to meet his wife’s needs (he is too frightened to sleep in the cave at night with the other bats, he just wants to drink the tart juice of the lemons in the grove). In “The Barn at the End of Our Term,” past United States presidents are finding themselves reincarnated as horses–

‘I’m not dead…’ Eisenhower says. ‘I’m incognito. The Secret Service must have found some way to hide me here, until such time as I can return to my body and resume governance of this country. I can’t speak for the rest of you, but I’m no horse.’

–and in “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” four boys’ seemingly harmless prank comes back to haunt them. Don’t be mistaken, Karen Russell’s stories are not gothic horror stories, rather the characters just bump into odd twists of life which cause them to have to make difficult decisions.

My favorite story in this collection is “Reeling for the Empire.” Japanese girls are being collected from rural villages to spin silk, but what they think is just a year of factory work, is a life-changing experience. Literally. They are turned into silkworms. The silk coils in their stomach and is pulled from their fingertips in long, silky strands.

Karen Russell’s short stories are a great escape from reality, although I can’t guarantee that the escape will be any less real than life.

And if you haven’t yet read the Pulitzer-Prize finalist, Swamplandia, you better get onboard.