The Theoretical Foot

"Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher is not just the greatest American food writer who’s ever played the game — she’s one of our greatest writers, period. And The Theoretical Foot (a forgotten manuscript that languished in a file cabinet until it was published this year) is a lost-and-found treasure. It’s a loosely fictionalized version of her romance with the artist Dillwyn Parrish — and, like an episode of The Real World: Pre-War Switzerland, it focuses on nothing more than a few days of perfect, uncorrupted youth in a house overlooking Lake Geneva, filled with food and friends and the small intrigues that come when the most significant things in the world are a lingering glance, the lighting of a cigarette or the flavor of gin on someone else’s lips."